On Mon, 01 Nov 2004 23:20:03 +0100, Colin Raven <duiker@haggis.nl> wrote:
> Greetings all,
> I deserve the "stupid moron of the decade" award....no question.
> I'm embarassed to even post this to a mailing list.
> In the excitement of adding software (in this case bash) while su'd to
> root, I went to chsh...and while changing the shell failed to complete
> the correct path to bash for root. Now I cannot su.
> 
> I did "chsh" while su'd
> in the text file I amended the path to read /usr/pkg/bin/csh instead of
> /usr/pkg/bin/bash
> of course an error was generated by the shell...and this was it:
> pwd_mkdb: warning, unknown root shell
> 
> I have the horrible feeling I just locked myself out and a reinstall is
> the only option.
> This is such a n00b thing to have done.
> Does anyone have a suggestion as to a way of rectifying this??
> as "me" I'm in the group wheel and also staff...but at this rather
> flustered moment cannot think of any use I could put that to.

Ahh, it's not that bad. You COULD mount the disk in your other
machine, mount the filesystem, and fix it.

But this would be a really excellent time to get a serial console
working as well. Not that it's going to help much in this particular
circumstance though....

I think probably a lot of us have hosed up the root account before. It
happens. Part of being a unix admin. Recovering from it is what
seperates you from the rest. Unfortunately on the Qube this often
means hacking the disk from another machine if you can't get it to
boot into single user via a serial console.

Andy