No root password and no firstboot

[natcolley]

I have Fedora 14 from a live cd, but it was never actually on any physical media. I used VirtualBox to mount it as if it were a real CD and went from there. I have (at least) two problems:

1. It will not let me log in as root. There is no mistake about the password. Going thru the internet tonight I see a lot of people have had this problem not only on Fedora but Debian as well and probably others.

I have seen a few fixes that seem to work for some people, but they all start from the presumption that the user is in the sudo group. I am not. I never got far enough to set that up. Which brings us to my second problem.

2. According to the documentation I saw, after I downloaded my additional apps and reboot, I would be taken to a screen called firstboot, after which I would set up all my other non-root users. Well, I have not seen this screen and I don't know how to call it up manually.

I do have 'live' user, but that won't let me change passwords or do anything with www, which was the whole point of this set up in the first place.

Any suggestions welcome and appreciated.

[smr54]

Start in runlevel 3. Add a user.

Fedora makes this a bit difficult, but as you boot, start hitting any key, in theory. I use F8 to remind myself that there is less and less difference between Fedora and Windows.

This will, if you started hitting it soon enough, take you to the grub menu. Hit e for edit, which will then take you to a window showing the three or four lines of grub. Find the long line, beginning with kernel, should be the third line. At the end of it, add 3, in other words, so that it looks like rhgb quiet 3

This will boot you into text mode, so you can log in as root. From there, you can add a user, give that user a password, and reboot normally, logging in as that user.

(The commands are adduser <username>, then, after the user is added, passwd <username>. You might want to do adduser -G audio,video <username> which will add them to the audio and video groups, necessary for some things, though after you boot into Gnome, you should be able to make them admin user or something like that--I forget if Fedora does that and don't know if it's a Gnome thing, or possibly just an Ubuntu thing.

[natcolley]

Thank you so much. Here are my results:
I don’t get a grub menu, I get fedora live desktop. Boot is the first option, but I am to press tab to edit, not e. Only the one line you describe shows up now.

….liveimg quiet rhgb rd_NO_LUKS NO etc…….

I took a shot in the dark and put the 3 after rhgb

That worked.
I put root and pw on same line, got error. Did root alone and got root@localhost, so it seems like I’m in without a pw. I put in my pw and got command not found.

I added myself as a user, but had some doubts because I didn’t see how I was going to give this user superuser privileges once I rebooted and signed in. On reboot, the live system kicked in again and offered my ONLY an automatic log in to the live user. I took that, logged out, and now clicked ‘other’, but when I went to log in as the newly created user, what did I get? Did you guess? AUTHENTICATION FAILURE. It is a vicious circle and I am getting close to chucking it all and going back to Windows.

My sense is that this is not a bug, but a deliberately designed feature intended to keep newbies from screwing up the system, which might be fine in a setting where IT experts are on hand and immediately available. For people like me, who just wants a test environment to match my web site, it is nothing but stupidity and frustration.

Ahhh… see? I feel better already. Now what?

[smr54]

Heh, those rants *can* make you feel better. Yeah, you're right, it's yet another newbie handholding feature.

I'm now a bit unclear. You installed the liveCD the first time, correct? Then, when you boot, you don't a grub menu?

As for the sudo thing, if you have a fix that would work that way, what you can do, rather than sudo is su -

This will ask for root's password. (Note the space and dash after the su).

The whole use sudo instead of root began with Apple and was adapted first by Ubuntu, then many others. RedHat and probably Debian always allowed any user to su to root, and it's a more traditional way to do it. The BSDs and Gentoo only allowed users in the wheel group to su to root, and indeed, if you look at various RH files, such as /etc/pam.d/su and /etc/sudoers, you'll see options for just allowing wheel group users to su.

So, try one of those solutions using sudo, but rather than sudo, use su -, and use root's password and see if that works.

[natcolley]

Heh, those rants *can* make you feel better. Yeah, you're right, it's yet another newbie handholding feature.

I'm now a bit unclear. You installed the liveCD the first time, correct?

Yes

Then, when you boot, you don't a grub menu?

Well, since I’ve never encountered grub before, I should not be so quick to say, but the word “grub” was nowhere to be seen and the menu I was offered did not match the description you gave. It said it was a livecd menu.

As for the sudo thing, if you have a fix that would work that way, what you can do, rather than sudo is su -

This will ask for root's password. (Note the space and dash after the su).

The whole use sudo instead of root began with Apple and was adapted first by Ubuntu, then many others. RedHat and probably Debian always allowed any user to su to root, and it's a more traditional way to do it. The BSDs and Gentoo only allowed users in the wheel group to su to root, and indeed, if you look at various RH files, such as /etc/pam.d/su and /etc/sudoers, you'll see options for just allowing wheel group users to su.

So, try one of those solutions using sudo, but rather than sudo, use su -, and use root's password and see if that works.

Looks to me like nothing I entered stuck. Root has no pw and according to su there is no user by my name.

Changing password for user natcolley – so that user must exist
Then I got
All authentication tokens updated successfully
All of which I got before.

Could it be that I am still operating on livecd, notwithstanding my clicking ‘install to hard drive’ and watching it go through all those paces? Might that explain the lack of memory for any changes I make?

[smr54]

Yes, you're operating on livecd. If I might make a suggestion you're probably better off using the quote and unquote tags--hrrm, if I type it, I think it will make it look like a quote, but I mean type [, then type the word quote, then ], and when done the same, but use /quote rather than quote. My aging eyes find the blue hard to read.

Anyway, yes, it sounds to me as if it's the liveCD running, and it didn't install. Which would, of course, explain why there isn't a root password and so on.

I'm not really familiar with the liveCD, so don't know what the problem is--but generally, at the end of an install, you'll be given instructions to reboot and remove the media before rebooting.

Did you see anything like that after finishing what seemed to be the install--and of course, the really dumb question--if you did, _did_ you remember to remove the liveCD before rebooting--that is, I know you said you set it up in VirtualBox, if I've understood, did you make sure to click the CD icon afterwards and remove it?

(I mean at the bottom of the VBox screen, you can click the CD icon and remove it from the machine.)

[natcolley]

Ok. I went back to Fedora and thought since 'all authentication tokens" were working, I would try su - one more time. and it worked - sort of. My user was logged on at localhost with the root password. So now I decided to reboot and see what happened.... and Fedora responded

reboot: need to be root

.

Your suggestion of taking out the cd was brilliant - and I'll take a little credit for planting the seed by asking about the live retention problem. Just as you have a virtual cd, so you have to take it out so it doesn't keep rebooting. And lo and behold, now I am at the firstboot screen. It remains to be seen if I will be frustrated by technology once again. Stay tuned, I'll report back.

[smr54]

CQTM (Chuckling quietly to myself, a more honest description than LOL). Been there, done that, how do you think I figured it out?

Take all the credit. You would have hit eventually, probably took so long because you may not be all that familiar with the Fedora boot screen and wouldn't have realized that you were still booting into the CD.

[ryptyde]

Hang in there you are on your way, most if not all started the same way

phil

[natcolley]

SMR,

Thank you so very much for your time, your ideas, and your commiseration. I do now seem to have a system that acts more or less as I expected it, even offering me a chance to authenticate myself with the root password so I could access users and groups. All the software I downloaded on the livecd are also gone, but at least that's easy to replace. Let the adventure begin.

[natcolley]

Hello - are you still out there, smr? and ryptide?

It seems that although you helped me get much farther than I had before, the ultimate problem - being unable to access www so I can put up a test site - remains.

I can open users and groups all I want to, I seem unable to join, create, or edit, a group that will give me su privileges aside from my current access to users and groups. I can't access sudoers.d to edit that file, either.

No doubt this can be done from the command line, but for that I would just be guessing.

All helpful idea welcome.

[smr54]

Once logged in, open a terminal. (Applications, System Tools, Terminal or something like that.)

su -

(Note the space and the dash)

Type in root's password.

From there you can edit /etc/sudoers. I've seen stevea, one of the most knowledgeable folks on the forum talk about sudoers.d, but I don't know anything about it, and editing /etc/sudoers works. Just add your user name to the end of the file. So, if your username is nat then


nat ALL=(ALL) ALL

Save the file and then you should be able to use sudo to run your commands.

[natcolley]

Thank you again. That worked. I waited to see if it would still work after rebooting before reporting back to you here, and it does. I seem to have all the privileges I need. Thank you again.

Sadly, I have run into yet another problem. apache can't bind to port 80. Since that seems unrelated to this issue, I will post elsewhere and look in the help files.

Again, thanks for your help. You've been great.

[smr54]

You're quite welcome. If you have no luck with googling with Apache, start another thread in the forums. (Under servers or networking forums, I guess.)
There's a lot of apache experts here.