chpasswd in Stackscript
What I'm trying to do:
echo "myusername:$password" | chpasswd
What I see in the log:
chpasswd: (user minecraft) pam_chauthtok() failed, error:
Authentication token manipulation error
chpasswd: (line 1, user minecraft) password not changed
I've tried all kinds of strategies for this. I originally thought could do something like:
echo -e "$password\n$password" | (passwd myusername)
which I've read on a lot of forums is the way to go, but I get token manipulation errors for that too.
Surely I'm not the only person who tries to set the password for a particular user in a Stackscript. Any idea what I'm doing wrong?
2 Replies
jyoo
Linode Staff
There are two factors at play here. The first is that chpasswd is normally used to update passwords in a batch, whereas sudo passwd $user is normally used to change an individual user account. Since this is a Stackscript, there may not be a way around this. However, feeding the information directly into /etc/shadow may be a better option than using chpasswd.
Typically an "authentication token manipulation error" is caused by a permissions issue. This permissions error can be in either the filesystem or /etc/shadow.
Filesystem
If the filesystem is mounted as read-only, you won't be able to change the user password. In this case you would need to remount the filesystem using sudo mount -o remount,rw /.
/etc/shadow
Incorrect permissions on this file can also cause errors with changing a user password. You can check permissions on /etc/shadow using ls -l /etc/shadow. The permissions should be 640; if they are not, change them using sudo chmod 640 /etc/shadow.
There are some less common errors that may be occurring; more information can be found in this article. Additional troubleshooting may involve using fsck or freeing up disk space.
I learned from a quick Google search that the most common cause of that error is that the filesystem is mounted read-only, but I'm skeptical that this is the problem here for two reasons. Firstly, it's a Stackscript, the very purpose of which is to tinker with a newly-minted Linode. And more to the point, the adduser command is successful. I originally tried to set the password in the adduser but got a token manipulation error from that too, so I thought maybe I could add the user and then set the password. Now the adduser works, but setting the password doesn't. All the other stuff my Stackscript does when I deploy a Linode--including downloading some files I have stored elsewhere--works. It just won't set the password.
I can't shake the feeling that I'm overlooking something simple that SHOULD be obvious to me.