On 01/30/2012 11:28 PM, Sergio Ballestrero wrote:
> On 30 Jan 2012, at 23:39, Yasha Karant wrote:
>> Upon boot, automatic fsck failed, and a request was posted for root password.  However, no more than one character of the password would be accepted, causing an endless loop to this condition and not allowing me control of the system (run fsck manually).
>
> For the next time (because there's always one ;-) ), you can use
> init=/bin/bash
> as a boot option, it will completely skip the standard init and therefore the root password request.
>
> It's anyway interesting that you could not login as root. What do you have in nsswitch and pam.d/system-auth ?
>
> Cheers,
>    Sergio
>

It was not that I could not login as root.  The prompt was there. 
However, instead of accepting the entire sequence of key presses 
(characters) that constitute the root password, after the first such 
character, whatever was running attempted to use the one character 
"series" as the password.  This single character was not the correct 
password, the attempt was rejected, and the prompt for Control-D or root 
password was again presented as an endless loop.

I will check both nsswitch and pam.d/system-auth when I get into the office.

I do not like the idea of having an automatic root backdoor for security 
reasons (a university, in a department of computer science and 
engineering, with some bright CS, CE, and Physics majors -- some of whom 
do not accept in practice the ethics we attempt to instill).  I have 
used and will continue to use the toor kludge as an alternative to root 
for situations in which the root home directory, etc., is corrupt -- but 
toor also is defended, not open.

Thanks,

Yasha