Root password disappears at every login, was "Cannot login as root"

[Anne Wilson]

On Sunday 16 November 2008 12:13:41 M. Fioretti wrote:
> On Sun, November 16, 2008 7:00 am, M. Fioretti wrote:
> >>>> I get the login prompt, type root, after a few seconds I get the login
> >>>> prompt again, the pc never asks for a password.
> >
> > after studying the dmesg output... I had an inspiration and disabled
>
> SELINUX by
>
> > adding "enforcing 0" at the end of the kernel line in grub.conf.
>
> that made the password prompt appear and I was able to login as root
> several times.
>
> After that, I installed with yum at the command line X (with nvidia
> drivers from rpmfusion) and then did a
>
> yum groupinstall 'Gnome Desktop Environment'
> yum groupinstall XFCE
>
> without noticing any errors. Then I set inittab to runlevel 5, rebooted
> and got the graphical login screen. Logged in as root, found everything OK
> in Gnome, created a normal user and rebooted.
>
> Since then, root password doesn't work anymore. If I login as the other
> user it works, but if I login as root or type "su -" I get a "password
> incorrect" message. If I boot in single mode and set again the root
> password I get "all authentication tokens updated successfully" but the
> password doesn't last.
>
> Next login as root, I get "password incorrect' again
> Any idea on what the problem could be now and why is only the root account
> having it?
>
I'm beginning to wonder if there's a deeper problem here.  I have a Mandriva 
box that upgraded from 2008.1 to 2009, and is running KDE3.  The same thing 
happened to me.  I then found that /usr/sbin/userhelper had lost its suid 
root.  I corrected that, and for the rest of that session I could give the 
root password.  I didn't work on that box again for a few days, but on Friday 
I discovered that once more I can't give the root password.  I haven't had 
time to investigate this further, yet.  Maybe tomorrow.

It does seem strange, though, that two distros are having the same problem, 
for no obvious reason.

Anne

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