I belong to too many groups

Bob at Brisbane jwillson at gargoyle.apana.org.au
Wed Jan 18 19:31:46 PST 2006


It took me so long to get onto this list that in the end I just gave and 
reinstalled over the top of the old one. It all works now, but I would still 
be interested in a way around the problem if one exists. The original 
problem is described below

I recently installed FreeBSD 6 RELEASE onto a hard drive and added two other
users, bob and bill.

Whilst I was doing this I decided to make root and bob members of ALL the
groups in the system.

I now find that I am unable to log in as either root or bob nor can I su 
from bob.
I have tried booting to safe mode but it will still not allow me to do 
anything
The messages that I get from the system are:

login: ROOT LOGIN (root) ON ttyv0
login: initgroups(root,0) : Invalid argument
login: setusercontext() failed - exiting

I can still log in as bill and this will allow me to see the system files
but bill doesn't have the authority to change anything.
I tried to su to root but bill is not in the wheel group.
If I want to run a graphical environment (and I do) then I need to start
this up as root.
Is there any way to get past this problem or will I need to reinstall?


Bob Willson 



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