Root password not working on console

Walt Elam wrelam at gmail.com
Fri Aug 31 23:26:51 UTC 2012


Jeremy,

Nailed it on the head. I had forgotten that a few weeks ago I was messing
around with that file.

I changed this line:

ttyv0   "/usr/libexec/getty Pc"     cons25  on  insecure

to this:

ttyv0   "/usr/libexec/getty Pc"     cons25  on  secure

And now I am able to login to root from the console.

Thanks for the quick help! I should've remembered that.

-Walt

On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 6:51 PM, Jeremy Johnston <
jeremy at stormy.smart-serv.net> wrote:

> 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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