user account changes lost on reboot

Jarrod Harch jarrod.harch at gmail.com
Tue Sep 27 16:53:44 PDT 2005


Hi Lowell, yes the home directory is intact.

I built and installed a new kernel, and after the reboot the accounts are
now staying intact. So it's a mystery. Perhaps it was some unfinished
sysinstall business, somehow overwriting the password database with the
defaults?

I'll reboot again tonight and check vipw, but hopefully the problem is now
behind me.

Thanks

On 27 Sep 2005 09:53:38 -0400, Lowell Gilbert <
freebsd-questions-local at be-well.ilk.org> wrote:
>
> Jarrod Harch <jarrod.harch at gmail.com> writes:
>
> Jarrod Harch <jarrod.harch at gmail.com> writes:
>
> > Hi, I just setup a new 5.4 install, which went fairly well. I added
> > some accounts - I used adduser to do one account, and logged on as the
> > user OK. The other account was created when I installed gdm as the
> > display manager.
> >
> > On rebooting the root password is missing, the user account I created
> > is also gone (but the home directory and files are still there). gdm
> > won't start, complaining that the gdm user doesn't exist.
> >
> > I recreated the user again but it vanished after the next boot.
> >
> > Does anyone know what might cause these account changes to be lost?
> > Sorry if this has been answered already, I couldn't find anything on
> > Google or mailing lists.
>
> This is pretty weird all right. Is the user's home directory still
> present? If you run vipw(8), do you see the user there?
>


More information about the freebsd-questions mailing list