Loss of accounts with f11 update

Panu Matilainen pmatilai at laiskiainen.org
Fri Apr 3 10:30:50 UTC 2009


On Fri, 3 Apr 2009, shmuel siegel wrote:

> I did a massive (~800mb) yum update last night, apparently in two stages. My 
> laptop ran out of power in the middle before completing the transaction. I 
> later ran yum-complete-transaction which removed 173 packages. I know that at 
> least some of this was correct since it removed old versions of wine and 
> wireshark. Unfortunately, the passwd file seems to have problems now, the 
> boot process complains that root is an unknown user. After loading all 
> daemons that will work, the machine becomes unusable since I don't know any 
> valid login names.
>
> 1) - how do I make my laptop usable ( I don't want to reinstall because I am 
> not sure that I remember how to up broadcom wireless)
> 2) - what should I look for to help track down the problem

There was a bug (just fixed this morning) in rpm which makes 
yum-complete-transaction do nasty things. Mind you the language in the 
report is not for those easily offended... 
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=492947

The short recovery guide:
- boot from a rescue disk or with init=/bin/bash
- locate recent .rpmsave files, rename to original name (eg
   /etc/passwd.rpmsave -> /etc/passwd)

 	- Panu -




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