Cannot login to root account on FreeBSD 7.0

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 08:39:46PM +0530, Pramod Dematagoda wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-10-31 at 16:00 +0100, Mel wrote:
> > On Friday 31 October 2008 15:53:23 Pramod Dematagoda wrote:
> > > On Fri, 2008-10-31 at 07:09 -0700, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> > > > On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 06:59:04PM +0530, Pramod Dematagoda wrote:
> > > > > But now I've faced a big problem, I can no longer seem to login to the
> > > > > root account where whenever I supply the proper credentials to the
> > > > > login screen, I always get thrown back to the login screen. This
> > > > > started happening after I installed D-bus and HAL through the FreeBSD
> > > > > ports which were built upon Xorg 1.5.1 which I had built myself
> > > > > previously, so I am wondering if something I did may have caused the
> > > > > problem.
> > > >
> > > > Reboot the machine and at the FreeBSD beastie/loader menu, hit "4" to
> > > > boot into single-user mode.  Once there, do:
> > > >
> > > > # mount -a
> > > > # mount -o rw -u /
> > > > # passwd root
> > > >
> > > > And change the password.  "reboot" and you should be good to go.
> > >
> > > Hey Jeremy,
> > >
> > > Thanks for looking into the problem, but unfortunately your solution did
> > > not work, I changed the root password to something else, however I still
> > > cannot login to root once I boot FreeBSD normally.
> > 
> > There should be in indication in /var/log/messages or /var/log/auth.log.
> > 
> I checked /var/log/messages, and I found something interesting, it seems
> that csh exits with signal 11(core dumped) right after a root login,
> there is nothing out of the ordinary in auth.log. But now what do I do
> to fix the problem, change the shell?

csh should not sig11.

Are you sure this machine does not have hardware problems?  Please
download and run memtest86++ from a CD.  You shouldn't have to run this
very long (15-20 minutes at tops in this case); errors will be quite
obvious.

You can try changing the shell to /bin/sh, but this is not recommended
(meaning, if/when you get the system working again, please change it
back to /bin/csh -- I can't stress this enough).

You can change the shell by following the above steps I gave you, but
using "chsh" instead of "passwd root".

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |