lost root passwd

[Joshua Tinnin]

On Sat 16 Apr 05 09:57, Marty Landman <MLandman at face2interface.com> 
wrote:
> I have a relatively new 5.2 installation

You should probably install 5.3-RELEASE if at all possible, or 
4.11-RELEASE (though 6.x is soon to be the STABLE branch). 5.2 is no 
longer supported, and it wasn't a production release. 5.3 is the first 
"true" release of the 5.x branch - 5.4 will be released very soon, 
incidentally. I'm not terribly familiar with the errors you're getting, 
so I'm not sure, but I don't think it's related to your particular 
release (something might be up with pam?), though in general you're 
running unsupported software.

Try:

% sysctl kern.securelevel

If it's anything but -1, and if you have kernsecurelevel_enable="YES" in 
your /etc/rc.conf you might have problems ...

More below ...

> and have forgotten the root 
> pw, although I can log on as a member of group wheel.
>
> Not sure how to fix this situation.
>
> 1.   /etc/master.passwd has perm's of 0600 so afaik can't change this
> except as root
>
> 2.   rebooting from the installation CD then selecting single user
> mode throws me directly into /stand/sysinstall; from there selecting
> the reset root pw option is consistently ignored
>
> 3.   rebooting into single user mode from the HD, after entering
>
> # mount -t ufs -a

Did you do 

# mount -u /

?

> ...
> # passwd

Try:

# passwd root

> the response is
>
> passwd: pam_chauthtok(): error in service module
>
>
> Anyway I can fix this?

Here's some info about PAM: 
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/pam/pam-config.html

I'm not seeing pam_chauthtok() in the list of FreeBSD PAM modules: 
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/pam/pam-freebsd-modules.html

... but that's a bit over my head ...

- jt