Dear friends,
I had one of my engineers go down to a remote site and install FreeBSD 8.0. The idea was to build a firewall and gateway using PF. The procedure is something I've been doing for quite some time now.
On this machine however, after the initial installation was done, I added the PF options into the kernel file and rebuilt it using
Once this activity completed, I sent the machine for a reboot and I cannot login using my username / password combination using SSH. I sent the engineer to the remote site again the next day and to our utter surprise, I found the root's password was reset to a blank password. All he had to do was type root at the console and press enter and it came to the # prompt. Everything else was fine, my networking configuration I did remotely was untouched, the kernel configurations was fine too, but my intial username was deleted from the system, I didn't find an entry in /etc/passwd.
Alright, so I asked him to set a new password to root and added a new account for myself and left. Today when I log in, my account is there alright, but the root's password has been reset back to a blank password. This problem has never happened to me after a kernel rebuild and is new to me. But I would like to know what's causing this and how to address this permanently.
Thanks for all your time,
Blue
I had one of my engineers go down to a remote site and install FreeBSD 8.0. The idea was to build a firewall and gateway using PF. The procedure is something I've been doing for quite some time now.
On this machine however, after the initial installation was done, I added the PF options into the kernel file and rebuilt it using
cd /usr/src make buildkernel KERNCONF=NEWKERNEL make installkernel KERNCONF=NEWKERNELOnce this activity completed, I sent the machine for a reboot and I cannot login using my username / password combination using SSH. I sent the engineer to the remote site again the next day and to our utter surprise, I found the root's password was reset to a blank password. All he had to do was type root at the console and press enter and it came to the # prompt. Everything else was fine, my networking configuration I did remotely was untouched, the kernel configurations was fine too, but my intial username was deleted from the system, I didn't find an entry in /etc/passwd.
Alright, so I asked him to set a new password to root and added a new account for myself and left. Today when I log in, my account is there alright, but the root's password has been reset back to a blank password. This problem has never happened to me after a kernel rebuild and is new to me. But I would like to know what's causing this and how to address this permanently.
Thanks for all your time,
Blue
Love the above statment. Anyway, the intention was never that! You are only seeing a question that I posted and have no idea about what other technologies and responsibilities I've to fight with on a day to day basis. Some may choose to call it lazy or other as a liability to the Internet community etc, but in the daily run, the FreeBSD boxes which have a very limited role in my infra at the remote sites were doing their job perfectly and I was happy with what they were doing.