Root password not working on console

Jeremy Johnston jeremy at stormy.smart-serv.net
Fri Aug 31 22:51:52 UTC 2012


On 08/31/2012 03:37 PM, Walt Elam wrote:
> I recently *accidentally* removed myself from the wheel group, so I was no
> longer able to use su to root. To fix it, I hooked up a monitor and
> keyboard to my FreeBSD 8.2 box so I could login as root, but it kept
> rejecting my password. I restarted the machine in single-user mode, did the
> following:
>
> mount -u /
> mount -a
> passwd
> exit
>
> So it booted back in to multi-user mode. Once again, I tried to login as
> root, but got the same "Login incorrect" message. Puzzled, I repeated the
> previous steps using the password "pass" this time. However, I went ahead
> and added my user account to the wheel group while in single-user mode.
> Once in multi-user mode again, I still got "Login incorrect" (specifically,
> pam_acct_mgmt(): authentication error) when logging in as root. I SSH'd to
> the machine as my regular user, typed su, and entered "pass" which worked
> just fine.
>
> So, I have absolutely no clue why I am unable to login to my machine, on
> the console, as root with "pass", but it works when using su from a regular
> user account. I tried searching around but almost all of the hits are about
> resetting the root password in single-user mode. Does any one know what I'm
> doing incorrectly?
>
> Thanks for any help in advance,
>
> -Walt

The only thing that comes to mind would be to check /etc/ttys and see if 
the console ttys are set to insecure, which would prevent root login.
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