Nekochan Net

Here's a lengthy tale of woe, I took my Octane completely apart for it's annual dust-out, and also to install 8 gig of RAM, only 6 of which work, oh well, anyway the machine was apart for a couple of days, don't know if that's got anything to do with the issue but when I put it back together I couldn't login, it would pop up a dialog saying my password had expired, and prompt me for a new one, then verify the new one, then ask me for the old one, then it would go back to the login screen, from which I would attempt to login only to get the exact same treatment. I can login via telnet, which also informs me that my password has expired, but once I set it to a new one it lets me in. But if I exit and login again, the new one doesn't work, I use the old one, and once again go through the expired routine and it lets me in. I tried to login as root with all the same problems, with of course the exception that I can't telnet in as root, nor can I su to root once I get in as me. W, as they say, TF?

While it was apart it was possessed by demons, right?

So, just mount the disk elsewhere and clear the password fields I suppose, it's just so odd...

Rule One : never take apart a running Silicon Graphics computer

I know! You can't put Humpty Dumpty back together again...

Does your system disk have a write protect jumper that could have gotten shorted? Or maybe somehow it's not remounting the root filesystem read-write during boot-up... I dunno, probably not the answer but the password change sounds like it works but isn't getting written to disk or something.

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Then? ... Now? +MLA ... Other: DEC Sun, DG AViiON, NeXT

Everything looks perfectly normal when I telnet in, I can create files, all the files in my home directory look fine, but each time I telnet in it makes me change my password but it's definitely not writing the new one to either shadow or passwd:


This is with IRIX 6.5.30...

Oops edit: I just checked the system date it is writing to shadow the date has been reset to the beginning of the epoch!



What the hell?

Looks like your Dallas (RTC) ran out of juice...

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Now this is a deep dark secret, so everybody keep it quiet
It turns out that when reset, the WD33C93 defaults to a SCSI ID of 0, and it was simpler to leave it that way... -- Dave Olson, in comp.sys.sgi
Currently in commercial service: (2x)
In the museum: almost every MIPS/IRIX system.
Wanted: GM1 board for Professional Series GT graphics (030-0076-003, 030-0076-004)

Guess I'll be taking it apart again...

Got my new Dallas DS1687-5 chip from Digikey, a mere $14 US and change, put it in (it's socketed, easy as pie) and booted to single user mode, reset the system clock from the beginning of the epoch, which is apparently where it goes when the Dallas chip battery gives out, also reset my password and root's, booted back to the normal runlevel and everything's fine.

So, to summarize, the main symptoms of a dead Dallas chip battery are: The system complains that your password has "expired(aged)" - but when you try to set a new one through the provided dialogs it doesn't work and you end up locked out of your account, i.e. the system won't accept either password, the new one or the old one. In my case I was able to telnet in (that's gotta be a security hole) whereupon I noticed that the file date of /etc/shadow, set from my recent though seemingly failed password changing attempts, was Jan 1 1970, which, when I posted about that, is where jan-jaap told me my Dallas chip battery had died. Thanks jan-jaap!