Very Computer

.... that you may be able to help me with.

One of the junior sys admin guys here has managed to lose the root shell by
specifying an incorrect path in /etc/passwd.  He changed roots shell path to
/sbin/ksh from /bin/ksh.  We cannot now log onto this box as root as we have
no shell, and in having no root permissions I cannot telnet, rlogin or ftp
to the macine to correct the entry.  Help much appreciated on this as it is
one of our mission critical boxes.

Brett

Boot from the CDROM, mount the disk, edit /etc/passwd, reboot.

Then, as penance, make that sysadmin read the damn man pages for
passwd -e and usermod. Regardless of the wisdom of changing root's
shell, changing it by manually editing /etc/passwd is really dumb.

  # passwd -e
  Old shell: /sbin/sh
  New shell: /sbin/ksh
  warning: /sbin/ksh is unavailable on this machine
  # usermod -s /sbin/ksh root
  UX: usermod: ERROR: /sbin/ksh is not a valid shell.  Choose another.
  #

--

STOP-A
sync
boot cdrom -sw
mount root partition on /a/mnt/
edit /a/mnt/etc/passwd file for appropriate shell.
fire junior admin :).

Or you can search deja.com for 1,000,000 questions similiar
(actually exactly) like this.

HTH,

Pete.

    No, you can't do that on Solaris.  The FAW points out that the two
easiest choices are:

1). the CDROM thing
and
2). if you are running NIS, get in through another host.

3). Some folks keep an alter-ego with UID 0 and some password that's locked in the

safe.

If all of the above fails, buy another system, install on it, then take the disk
out of
the broken one, mount on the new one, etc, etc.

Speaking only for myself,

Joe Durusau

PS: It is a good idea to have anyone who does this sort of thing read
the messages about 'root shell disease' and present an elaborate statistical
analysis of the prenomenon.

        And who changed it from /sbin/sh?

Quote:> We cannot now log onto this box as root as we have
> no shell, and in having no root permissions I cannot telnet, rlogin or ftp
> to the macine to correct the entry.  Help much appreciated on this as it is
> one of our mission critical boxes.

        Surely your senior sys admin could fix this with one hand tied behind
        his back and wearing a blindfold, nes't pas?

-am

You will have to boot cdrom -s (single user mode) moun tthe hard drive
mount /dev/dsk/c?t?d?s? /a

cd /a/?? and fix the problem

Chris

--

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Since you jumpstarted all these machines (right :-) your boot
server knows all about 'em.  Net boot is usually quicker and not
*all* your clients may have a cdrom. The same mount/edit/reboot
procedure then applys.

Quote:> fire junior admin :).

Good people are hard to find. After sweating through this that Jr. Admin
is *much* more experienced :-)....

Joe