can not change root passwd with root id

[Anh-Thu Tran]

We directly login to HP-UX 11i with root id and try to change root passwd by using "passwd root". We got error said "Unexpected failure. Password file unchanged" after it let us enter the new passwd and confirm. Don't know what's wrong. Please help. This machine is NIS client.

[DCE]

try passwd by itself. Since you are logged on directly as root, you should not need to specify the id.

[Anh-Thu Tran]

I got the same result with your suggestion.

[Jeff Schussele]

What's the result of the following command?

which passwd

You may need to use the binary in sbin instead of the one in /usr/bin. The one in sbin is statically linked and will work even in singlr user mode or when there may be lib files missing or corrupted.

HTH,
Jeff

[DCE]

Are you using any special characters in the paasword? There are a few (*,#) that will not work.

[Juan M Leon]

Hi, I will suggest to use the following

passwd -n files root

It will force to change the password locally. I hope it works for you

Thanks

Juan

[Anh-Thu Tran]

We used the same passwd and changed successfully on another HP 11i machine. So I don't think passwd is the problem. The size and permission between /sbin/passwd and /usr/bin/passwd is liltle bit different. Should I concern about that?

[Juan M Leon]

Correction what I meant is -r
password -r files root

previous post is incorrect.

Thanks

Juan

[Ryan Green · Accepted solution]

Run the pwck(1m) command against the password file. If someone did a vi or vipw, they may have introduced an error in the file.

Use the -s option for tcb. In this case, someone may have performed an edit on root's file.

If this doesn't work, and you're getting logged in as root, you can copy a known encrypted password from another user into root's password field.

[Anh-Thu Tran]

After running pwck and correct some error based on its recommendation, we successfully changed the root passwd. Thank you everyone.