Saturday, September 10, 2016

passwd: permission denied error when trying to update a user's password

I just installed Ubuntu on a new machine and everything seemed to be going fine. I and a coworker were having some issues with a few things and have managed to lock-out a local admin (sudo?) account after unjoining an AD domain using realm while troubleshooting some McAfee issues were were having. I'm 99.9% certain that the password has not changed for the user. I have followed ALL the steps found here for resetting the password as root in recovery. When I try to run


sudo passwd USERNAME


I get the error:


root@hostname:~# sudo passwd USERNAME
passwd:Permission denied
passwd:password unchanged
root@hostname:~#


When I try to do the steps for the "The Drastic Measures", I notice that the shadow file does not show what would usually indicate an encrypted password for the user. Instead it looks like:


username:!:14920:0:99999:7:::


I have removed the exclamation point and still have issues. Even when I run


passwd


as root through recovery, I get a permissions denied error. As it stands right now, I can only log into the machine as root through recovery. I'm at a complete loss at this point and trying to avoid breaking down the machine and starting from scratch. Any help you guys can provide would be greatly appreciated.

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