Charles Galpin wrote:
> sigh. Ok, I swear I have no idea how they do it, but my Mom and her
> office staff never cease to amaze me.... I hope I don't get too long
> winded here.
>
> This was the message you got at the console when trying to log in. From
> ssh 1K miles away I just got permission denied.
>
> I'm guessing they did a hard reset on the box and corrupted
> /etc/passwd,group,shadow and who knows what else.
>
> The first thing I did was checked the archives, and several people
> mentioned the problem was likely that these files got corrupted.
>
> So (as painful as you can imagine) I talked one of the ladies through
> booting into single user mode and took a look at these files. Sure enough
> the passwd file had a zero length, so I had her copy passwd- over it.
>
> A reboot revealed the problem still existed. I had her copy the old group
> file over, but since the shadow file was roughly the same size as the old
> one, I didn't have her copy it - maybe my main problem here.
>
> Another reboot proved the problem hadn't gone away. I was out of time, so
> we stopped there. The joke of it is I have nightly backups on disk, I just
> don't remember exactly where I am backing them up to, and what scheme I am
> using - most likely just .tgz files of /etc /root etc. However I can't
> imagine talking them through finding them and doing a restore without it
> taking *hours*.
>
> The changes did seem to help a bit. Processes like postfix are at least
> working again (getting my logcheck messages again), but I still can't ssh
> in to fix it!
>
> So, has anyone any advise to offer? I guess I'll try copying the shadow
> file next. I'm pretty sure finding the backups and restoring from them is
> the best way to go, but I fear it'll be damn near impossible. I'm not sure
> If I can endure much more "l..s..space..no, L like lucy, S like sam.
> l..s..space..-.like a minus..no, not underscore..dash..the key next to the
> zero..l.." And the feedback sucks. It's like they can't read.
>
> Anyone live near Clearwater Florida? If I can't fix this, I'd be happy to
> pay someone to help out - It'll cost me several hundred to fly down, and
> more than that for lost work time if that's what it boils down to.
Charles, What about setting up a boot/rescue disk with the correct network
setup and telnetd on it so you can get into the box? Fedex will only cost
about $25 or so. I would guess that tom's boot disk could be setup to do
this. This of course assumes a floppy drive in the machine. I have
considered putting something like this on a small partition on some remote
boxes so that if the fs gets corrupted I have a chance of getting a boot
working well enough to be able to telnet into the machine.
Hmm now that I think about it I bet the linux routeer project has one with
the requsite daemons on it but this is a wag.
Hope this helps.
Bret
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