sudo and su - pam issue.

emaz · 2011-11-30 08:14:30

Hi,

I've gotten my self into one little perdicament. Manually installed the pam package via sudo pacman -S pam. Now I can't seem to login via ssh with any user. And the problem is that I rarly physically at this computer so I havn't tried logging in the normal way yet. I however have a lingering irc session alive that was up before I installed the pam package, so that's my only route into the computer now.

But I cannot gain root access in that session since sudo returns "sudo: pam_authenticate: Module is unknown" and su - returns "invalid password" so I cant even begin to try and fix the problem. So primarily I'm wondering if there's any way of regaining root access via ssh to fix the problem.

If not; how would I go about and get any root terminal in which I can't perform pacman commands to update the system if needed?

Thanks for any help!

Ashren · 2011-11-30 09:23:03

If you can not login with any user via ssh it will be impossible to regain root access with ssh.

You would have to boot the system with a live cd (one with ssh enabled if you want to fix it remotely) and setup a chroot environment. You would need a person to boot the computer and provide you with ssh login details if it is not listed in the liveCD documentation.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Chroot

emaz · 2011-11-30 12:02:27

Alright, thanks. I was afraid something like that was needed

Arch Linux

#1 2011-11-30 08:14:30

sudo and su - pam issue.

#2 2011-11-30 09:23:03

Re: sudo and su - pam issue.

#3 2011-11-30 12:02:27

Re: sudo and su - pam issue.

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