Root Password Change Causes Problem

Symptoms:

You change the root password on a machine, and the change either fails to take effect or you are unable to log in as superuser.

Possible Cause:

For security reasons, you should not have User ID 0 listed in the passwd table.

You changed the root password, but root's key was not properly updated. Either because you forgot to run chkey -p for root or some problem came up.

Solution

Log in as a user with administration privileges (that is, a user who is a member of a group with administration privileges) and use passwd to restore the old password. Make sure that old password works. Now use passwd to change root's password to the new one, and then run chkey -p.

Once your NIS+ namespace is set up and running, you can change the root password on the root master machine. But do not change the root master keys, as these are embedded in all directory objects on all clients, replicas, and servers of subdomains. To avoid changing the root master keys, always use the -p option when running chkey as root.