Did I do something wrong?

[Ruben de Groot]

On Tue, Aug 05, 2003 at 09:38:16PM -0400, Gregory Felter typed:
>   I received the information for my dedicated FreeBSD box today from the 
> hosting company.  It's an unmanaged box which was supposed to be running 
> 4.8 but is running 5.1 because they said 4.8 would not install (Doubtful to 
> me, sounds like an order mix up)
>   I did as instructed and changed my login password to the account they set 
> for me and the SU password.  Next I found that they did a minimal install 
> so through sysinstall I went to post install configurations and loaded in 
> all distribution sets including ports.  When this finished I installed my 
> editor of choice, pico.  In order to use pico after just installing it you 
> must exit out from root and log in as root again.  I typed exit and was 
> back to my account prompt.  For some reason I typed uname -a to see what 
> info would show up.  After looking at the output I typed su and received 
> back "who are you?" I was surprised at the response so I typed su again, 
> same response.  Now, not knowing what to think, I said well I'll try 
> logging in again.  I'm still trying to log on!  I'm locked out of the box.
>  I know this is rather long but I just want to make sure I didn't do 
> anything wrong.  I'm not new to FreeBSD but this really has me puzzled.  
> Did I screw up?  Did they make a faulty install?  Any thoughts?

When you "loaded in" all distribution sets you overwrote the passwd files. 
So your stuck with a default passwd file now (root without a 
password and no additional users accept the default ones)

You might find backups of the old passwd files in /var/backup, but for 
that you have to get in first from the console.

I'd say you screwed up ;-)

good luck,
Ruben