[fedora-arm] initial setting of root password is not working

[Andrew Wing]

Well, it seems I can answer my own question as to why I couldn't log into
my newly set up Fedora system. As far as I can tell, the set up service not
setting up the passwords meant that some of the services were not working
as expected and this was why I couldn't log in. In the end I copied across
the passwd/shadow/gshadow files from a working qemu simulation and then I
could log in OK in multi-user mode.

Andrew


On 7 July 2015 at 08:19, Andrew Wing <andrew.wing at bgch.co.uk> wrote:

> Thanks for the suggestion Scott. I've broken into my own system :-)  I can
> see the root password set as expected when I sneak in with a bash shell
> before all the multi-user stuff is running. In this state I can even play
> around with the passwd command and enter the 'old' password correctly.
> Unfortunately it is still not letting me log in at the latter stage when
> all the multi-user services are running! I guess that some service is not
> running or not running correctly or the login service has been upset by
> another service. At the moment my thought is too stop various other
> services running and try to narrow down the area that is going wrong. If
> anyone has any thoughts, I'll hear them very gratefully!
>
> Andrew
>
> On 1 July 2015 at 22:30, Scott M. Jones <scott at aprr.org> wrote:
>
>> Can you mount the root filesystem on another Linux system somewhere and
>> edit /etc/passwd?  If so, remove the 'x' in the root line so it just
>> starts with root:: and then you can log in as root with no password when
>> you boot up F22.  Then use 'passwd' to set it to something else once you
>> log in.
>>
>> You should boot as 'ro' and the kernel will remount as 'rw' at the right
>> time.
>>
>> -Scott
>>
>>
>> On 7/1/15 5:14 PM, Andrew Wing wrote:
>> > Hi Guys,
>> >
>> > I recently got Fedora at 22 running on my ARM OEM Board ( TI AM3352 OMAP
>> > family SoC).
>> >
>> > As there is no micro-SD socket on the board itself, I followed the
>> > installation instructions from here
>> > /https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/F22/Installation/
>> > except that after I had xzcat'd the minimal image to an SD card (on the
>> > host!). I then blatted the whole thing out again via dd onto the board's
>> > emmc memory. Then rebooting the board into u-boot, I used the following
>> > commands (thanks Peter Robinsom at list) to boot into linux.
>> >
>> > setenv bootargs console=${console} root=LABEL=_/ ro rootwait
>> > ext4load mmc 0:1 0x80300000 vmlinuz-4.0.4-301.fc22.armv7hl
>> > ext4load mmc 0:1 0x81600000 uInitrd-4.0.4-301.fc22.armv7hl
>> > ext4load mmc 0:1 0x89300000 my-device-tree.dtb
>> > bootz 0x80300000 0x81600000 0x89300000
>> >
>> > Great stuff! Everything boots up, welcome to F22 etc. Then the initial
>> > set up (text) runs and I set a root and user password. After this has
>> > seemingly all worked fine, I'm asked to use my new credentials to log
>> > in. The password I've just created is then roundly rejected as an
>> > invalid login!
>> >
>> > My first thought was that I should have used rw rather than ro in my
>> > bootargs, so I repeated and had exactly the same result.
>> >
>> > I then thought that on the host machine I could just write to
>> > /etc/shadow on the root file system __ on the SD card image. For the
>> > root password I generated an MD5  checksum string and put that in as the
>> > root password. This worked fine on Ubuntu when I tried something similar
>> > as an experiment - a new user effectively had 'password' as a password.
>> > In this context, I hoped the same approach would in effect pre-load the
>> > root password when the whole image was dd'ed out to the emmc.
>> > Consequently I could avoid setting  any password in initial set-up - no
>> > luck, exactly the same result!!
>> >
>> > The initial setup is being used in a slightly unusual context - not
>> > booting from sd card but from the onboard emmc so that may be a problem.
>> > Unfortunately I can't effectively debug what's going wrong here because
>> > I can't get in without a root password.
>> >
>> > I can break into single user mode but that doesn't give me root user
>> > privilege.
>> >
>> > This is very frustrating as I don't even want a root password whilst in
>> > development and I'm sure there's some idiotic obvious thing I'm missing
>> > to set the root password. Any thoughts ?!
>> >
>> > Thanks in advance.
>> >
>> > Andrew
>>
>>
>
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