Introduction
I recently upgraded the Ubuntu release from 16.04 to 18.04 to 20.04 and after completing the upgrades and fixing outstanding issues with apps that were running on that local development server I noticed the passwd command to change user passwords has stopped working.
What is the error
Here is what happens when I attempt to change my own user's password
joe@machine1:/etc$ passwd
Changing password for joe.
Current password:
passwd: Authentication token manipulation error
passwd: password unchanged
Here is what happens when I attempt to change another user's password
root@machine1:/etc# passwd openvpn
passwd: Authentication token manipulation error
passwd: password unchanged
Here is what I tried until now
Here are my attempts after looking at different solutions online.
- I have tried rebooting the system
- I have tried remounting the FS as read,write using this command
mount -o remount,rw / - I have tried using
pam-auth-update - I have checked the permissions on the following files:
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3790 Aug 17 12:45 /etc/passwd-rw-r----- 1 root shadow 2674 Aug 17 13:41 /etc/shadow-rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 68208 Jul 14 19:08 /usr/bin/passwd
- I have made sure that there was sufficient space on my filesystem. There is ~300GB free so I don't think that is part of the issue.
- I have used
pwckwhich did not really help, here is the output of that commanduser 'lp': directory '/var/spool/lpd' does not exist user 'news': directory '/var/spool/news' does not exist user 'uucp': directory '/var/spool/uucp' does not exist user 'list': directory '/var/list' does not exist user 'irc': directory '/var/run/ircd' does not exist user 'gnats': directory '/var/lib/gnats' does not exist user 'nobody': directory '/nonexistent' does not exist user 'openvpn': directory '/home/openvpn' does not exist user 'openvpn': program '/sbin/nologin' does not exist pwck: no changes
Any ideas what could be done to fix this issue. I can confirm that this used to work before the upgrade as I had recently added a user to the system.
