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I had a colleague (he left the company) that did a "hardening" on Ubuntu servers. He put the following:

useradd -D -f 30 chage --inactive 30 root

Which I understand that in 30 days the root account will expire... Now I couldn't log to root account.. because it is expired. I get a meesage saying:

Your account has expired; please contact your system administrator

Using my cloud provider portal I was able to create a new user (sudo user) and was able to change to root. But when I cange to root and put the password i'm still getting this:

Your account has expired; please contact your system administrator

su: Authentication failure

(Ignored)

Also I cannot change a password of ordinary user. I change it, then I log in and I get an authentication failure... crazy! maybe it is related to root issue..

I know that to re-enable an account I need to do it with root, but what about when the account you want to re-enable is root? :)

So, any idea about how can I fix this is welcome.

Thank you very much

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  • 2
    You should be able to do this in recovery mode. I don't remember being asked for the root password to bring up the command line.
    – AFH
    Jun 5, 2019 at 15:54
  • If you were "able to create a new user (sudo user) and [...] to change to root", why can't you use root to enable it?
    – muru
    Jun 6, 2019 at 1:54
  • Problem is that when I try to re-enable root with root user looks does not work... root@server1:~# passwd -u root sent invalidate(passwd) request, exiting sent invalidate(group) request, exiting sent invalidate(passwd) request, exiting sent invalidate(group) request, exiting passwd: password expiry information changed
    – Marcel
    Jun 6, 2019 at 7:23
  • And when I try to login as user, "su root" I put the correct password and I just get a su: permission denied"
    – Marcel
    Jun 6, 2019 at 7:25
  • also, I get this: Password has been already used. even if the password is completely ramdom...
    – Marcel
    Jun 6, 2019 at 7:40

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