newbie question - users deleted after playing with sysinstall

[Haim Ashkenazi]

On Tue, 08 Jun 2004 12:26:57 +0200, Ruben de Groot wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 08, 2004 at 11:38:13AM +0300, Haim Ashkenazi typed:
>> Hi
>> 
>> I've just finished install FreeBSD 4.10 for the first time. I'm an
>> experienced linux user, but have no experience with FreeBSD. after a very
>> basic installation (only the first step, to get ssh) I've put the computer
>> at my ISP (of-course everything is blocked by a firewall) and continued
>> from home. I then installed some packages from the "Distribution" menu,
>> and "played" with the menus to see what I can configure. today, I couldn't
>> login to the computer (ssh), and when I checked (I had someone there who
>> logged in locally) I found out root has no password and the regular
>> user I created was gone. my question is: could something I've done in
>> sysinstall delete the user and root password? it's not likely that someone
>> broke into the system because it's completely blocked (only open from my
>> IP).
> 
> Yes, that very likely. For instance, if you install the "bin" 
> distribution more than once, it'll overwrite all files in /etc, including
> master.passwd each time you do that.
yep, that's exactly what I did. well, I just wanted to be sure that nobody
broke into my system. 

thanx
-- 
Haim