I currently have a Virtual Machine that is running a SLES 10 SP3 Server.
After upgrading from this to SLES 11 SP1 (I selected the option to only
update the existing files that were installed), I find that I am not
able to login to the operating system as root or any system user. In
order for me to actually login, I had to run Rescue Mode and change the
passwords for root and the other system users using passwd before I was
able to login. I have never seen this happen before. After taking a
quick look through this forum, and using google, I have not really seen
anyone else mentioning having this issue.
So, I wanted to see if any other users may have encountered something
like this? If not, are the any useful suggestions of where I might be
able to look for clues as to what happened–other than /var/log/warn and
/var/log/messages?
I have this same issue. It is not a Virtual Machine. I upgraded from SLES 10 SP4 to SLES 11 SP1. I was able to boot to a rescue disk, chroot, and change passwords. However, this means all passwords will have to be changed. This is ok for a Sandbox system, but it will not work with a Production system.
Could it have something to do with the PAM modules, or the the hash in the shadow file?
While no resolution has been reported in that thread, maybe Mike (“endc01”) is willing to provide feedback on how his case got solved?
Please also note that there’s no direct migration path SLES10SP3 to SLES11 (http://www.novell.com/support/kb/doc.php?id=7010200) - probably some required change was introduced with SLES10SP4. As far as I recall the default encryption mechanism was “blowfish” with SLES10, but later (SP4?) changed to “md5” - do you still have access to the old /etc/default/passwd file to compare?