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Re: debian forgot usr pw

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On 12/7/23 17:06, gene heskett wrote:
> I had a 3d slicer I was quitting to restart it and re-organish its 
> caxhe, took my machine to a lockup showing half a workspace on one half 
> the screen and half an adjacent workspace on the other half of the 
> screen, no responce to the keyboard and no mouse. 28 days uptime which 
> was better than most uptimes I have with bookworm. 2 weeks seems to be 
> the norm.
> 
> TL;DR:
> 
> So I went to the front panel and pressed the reset button but when it 
> came time to enter my pw, it just looped back to the login prompt.  So I 
> did a full powerdown, enough times the psu finally went face down in the 
> pool.  That was a good excuse to do an overdue D & C and some update 
> installs while I was changing the supply, adding a 16 port sata-III 
> controller and 8T worth of SSD's so I could use them to get amanda 
> started again. Powered it up, bios found the new drives, but my pw was 
> still rejected, it looped back to the login in 2 or 3 seconds.


A failing power supply can cause very strange behavior, including file 
corruption that will haunt you after replacing the power supply.


> I do not normally have a root pw set, just me, using sudo when I need to 
> do root stuff. So at grub I hit e and changed quiet to single, 
> eventually spotting in all the spew, something go flying by about the 
> root account being locked, so "single" does not work.  And of course no 
> scrollback to read that msgs detail.
>
> Thats bug #1. Single for rescue demands a root pw. If no root, it should 
> default to the name in the sudoers file. So I'm still locked out and 
> this is the 3rd time debian 12 has done this to me. So I get out a 12.2 
> net-install dvd and reboot to it, several times, but I was able to set a 
> root pw so single worked but I still had to enter the new pw.


While I always set a root password, I do agree that people should be 
able to run Debian without a root password and everything should still 
work.  Perhaps you should consider filing a bug report against grub (?).


> At this point I successfully changed /my/ passwd to something a bit 
> longer expressing my frustration. So since all my other machine control 
> machines have a full desktop with full net access, I went to one of the 
> bananapi-m5's and sent firefox to google with the search string "linux 
> login loops back to login", 2nd hit, on stackexchange said to delete 
> anything that looked like ./XAuthority* and ditto ./xsession* something 
> was contaminated, killing x or its newer wayland cousin.  Bingo! Next 
> reboot was normal.
> 
> So that is bug #3. Deleting that stuff, possibly losing some setup 
> details by then re-starting X (etc) with a clean slate is far more 
> preferable to another format and reinstall just to delete the 
> contaminated files, formatting everything and losing 25 years of my 
> history like happened when those 2 new 2T seacrates died at about 6 
> weeks runtime, within hours of each other a bit over a year ago.
> 
> Seems to me stuff like this ought to be fixable.
> 
> Many thanks for reading this far. Maybe someone with write perms on 
> bugzilla can investigate?
> 
> Cheers, Gene Heskett.


If I am understanding you correctly, $HOME/.Xauthority and/or 
$HOME/.xsession-errors became corrupt when the PSU failed, and the fix 
was to replace the PSU and delete those files?  About the only idea that 
comes to mind would be to put in a feature request against Xorg that 
Xorg implement some automatic failure recovery protocol that includes 
those files when Xorg fails to start the windowing environment.


That said, I have little faith in the "find the needle in the haystack" 
and "put Humpty Dumpty back together again" approach to fixing operating 
system instances.  Even when it "seems to work", I rarely have 
confidence in the results -- "what needles did I miss?"  My response to 
this situation is disaster preparedness --  I take images of my OS 
drives monthly, or as needed.  In fact, I had a UEFI Debian image go 
sideways last weekend during maintenance.  I spent ~15 minutes 
investigating/ trouble-shooting/ STFW/ RTFM/ etc., could not find the 
answer, spent ~15 minutes re-imaging, spent ~15 minutes updating, and 
was back in business with a known good OS instance in less than an hour 
without any outside help.


David

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Thread

debian forgot usr pw gene heskett <gheskett@shentel.net> - 2023-12-08 02:10 +0100
  Re: debian forgot usr pw Greg Wooledge <greg@wooledge.org> - 2023-12-08 02:30 +0100
    Re: debian forgot usr pw gene heskett <gheskett@shentel.net> - 2023-12-08 02:50 +0100
      Re: debian forgot usr pw John Hasler <john@sugarbit.com> - 2023-12-08 06:10 +0100
        Re: debian forgot usr pw Pocket <pocket@columbus.rr.com> - 2023-12-08 14:00 +0100
          Re: debian forgot usr pw Timothy M Butterworth <timothy.m.butterworth@gmail.com> - 2023-12-09 07:40 +0100
            Re: debian forgot usr pw Pocket <pocket@columbus.rr.com> - 2023-12-09 15:10 +0100
      Re: debian forgot usr pw Max Nikulin <manikulin@gmail.com> - 2023-12-08 06:20 +0100
        Re: debian forgot usr pw yxcv@vienna.at - 2023-12-08 09:20 +0100
          Re: debian forgot usr pw debian-user@howorth.org.uk - 2023-12-08 12:30 +0100
          Re: debian forgot usr pw Anders Andersson <pipatron@gmail.com> - 2023-12-08 20:10 +0100
    Re: debian forgot usr pw John Hasler <john@sugarbit.com> - 2023-12-08 06:10 +0100
  Re: debian forgot usr pw David Christensen <dpchrist@holgerdanske.com> - 2023-12-08 22:50 +0100

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