On Tue, Nov 19, 2024 at 8:48 AM Meikel meikel@fn.de wrote:
If the above looks good, try adding a new user and see if you can login as that user.
It is not clear to me how I can do this, as I'm only able to start from a live media. If I run something like "useradd" this will add a user on the live media, but not on the installed system on the disk. As far as I know I need to chroot into the existing installation from the live media, but I never did that. With a quick search on the internet I found a sample script "Setting up chroot from a live image in Fedora. Regenerate grub2 for Fedora." (https://gist.github.com/Tamal/73e65bfb0e883e438310c5fe81c5de14) and I'm wondering if I could use this as a starting point?
You can: - useradd --root absolute-dirname - chroot - edit the files directly
Other thoughts as to things to check.... - expired passwords - bad character in the password field in /etc/passwd [1] - something messed-up with PAM - can't help much there
[1] Many years ago I supported a Unix system where suddenly account passwords weren't working. IIRC the passwords were set to "*" instead of "x". I assume there was an update of some sort and prior to the update it accepted "*" as "use shadow", but after the update it insisted on "x". It was a long time ago, and I may not be remembering the details correctly.