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Problem:
My password is not working for my regular account. I can log in (using the Gnome authentication manager) using my password, but once I have logged in the password does not work.
If I log in as root, I can use passwd to change the password of the user account without errors. However, if I su to the user account, nothing has changed; the password still does not work. E.g., see the following terminal dialogue:
[root@machine ~]$ passwd user
New UNIX password: [user_password] <-- successfully change user's password
[root@machine ~]$ su user
[user@machine ~]$ passwd
(current) UNIX password: [user_password] <-- same as was just set without error by root
passwd: Authentication failure
passwd: password unchanged <-- password does not work as user
[user@machine ~]$ su root
Password: [root_password]
su: Authentication failure <-- root password does not work either
Oddly, I can still log in using the Gnome authentication manager, but if I lock the screen with Gnome then I can't log back in.
Some information about my system that may be pertinent:
- I'm using GNOME 3 in fallback mode
- I just restored my Arch install from a clone of the root partition; the problem is new since then.
- [EDIT] I already tried booting from the live CD, chrooting, and resetting the password, but it didn't work.
Thanks in advance!
Last edited by brunnels (2013-02-10 05:47:33)
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Problem solved. This was the result of messing up the permissions of the files when I copied them over from my hard disk.
For future reference: whenever using cp to back up a partition, be sure to use the -a flag which preserves permissions!
[Partial] solution: Run the following commands:
chown root:root /usr/bin/sudo <---- make sure root owns sudo
chmod 4111 /usr/bin/sudo <---- set correct permissions *and* set the uid bit to 1
chmod 4111 /bin/su <---- same for su
Unfortunately there is no way to completely solve the problem of messing up permissions. Fortunately in this case, everything is still fairly functional; future problems may need to be resolved by changing ownership problems.
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