Arch Linux

deafeningsylence

Member

Registered: 2016-09-23

Posts: 52

[SOLVED] Disabled shadow.service - cannot be recovered, stays dead.

Dear Arch Community,

I recently added 2 users (xorg, dnscrypt) to try run the according packages non-root. However, I ended up notpursuing it (mainly because I did not precisely understand how to start the services as the other user). Later I noticed that shadow.service failed to load "no home directory for *these2users*". I tried userdel -r on them but that fails with PAM failure although the password is correct. My thought was that that had to do with the shadow.service not being active so I tried to restart it, no succcess, then I deleted the two users from all the shadow related files and passwd etc and disabled the shadow.service, which was a grand mistake I think. No way I know to re-enable it. The service stays dead no matter what (when I get its status with systemctl status).

Does anybody know how I could re-enable that service or do I need to setup the whole system again because the shadow.service is now compromised due to my tinkering?

All the best,

An arch fan

Last edited by deafeningsylence (2018-03-09 16:53:50)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,740

Re: [SOLVED] Disabled shadow.service - cannot be recovered, stays dead.

"Dead" simply means that the service ran and has stopped. If it ran successfully, which you will see from the exit code status (and from the absence of big red warning messages during boot) everything is fine. It is not supposed to remain started. It will run once per boot, and the exit code will determine if the consistency check was successfull or not.. If still in doubt, share the complete output of the corresponding systemctl status command, within [ code ] tags.

deafeningsylence

Member

Registered: 2016-09-23

Posts: 52

Re: [SOLVED] Disabled shadow.service - cannot be recovered, stays dead.

Hence, truly a post belonging in this section of the forum thanks V1del!