Solutions to Common Problems

• 1: Boot in Emergency Mode
• 2: Resetting a Lost Root Password
• 3: Fixing Permissions on Network Config Files
• 4: Permitting Root Login with SSH
• 5: Fixing Sendmail

1 - Boot in Emergency Mode

If you encounter problems during normal boot, you can boot in Emergency Mode.

Perform the following steps to boot in Emergency Mode:

1. Restart the Photon OS machine or the virtual machine running Photon OS.

   When the Photon OS splash screen appears, as it restarts, type the letter e quickly.

2. Append emergency to the kernel command line.

3. Press F10 to proceed with the boot.

4. At the command prompt, provide the root password to log in to Emergency Mode.

   By default, / is mounted as read-only.

   To make modifications, run the following command to remount with write access:

   mount -o remount,rw /

2 - Resetting a Lost Root Password

Perform the following steps to rest a lost password:

1. Restart the Photon OS machine or the virtual machine running Photon OS.

   When the Photon OS splash screen appears as it restarts, type the letter e to go to the GNU GRUB edit menu quickly. Because Photon OS reboots so quickly, you won’t have much time to type e. Remember that in vSphere and Workstation, you might have to give the console focus by clicking in its window before it will register input from the keyboard.

Second, in the GNU GRUB edit menu, go to the end of the line that starts with linux, add a space, and then add the following code exactly as it appears below:

rw init=/bin/bash

After you add this code, the GNU GRUB edit menu should look exactly like this:

Now type F10.

At the command prompt, type passwd and then type (and re-enter) a new root password that conforms to the password complexity rules of Photon OS. Remember the password.

Next, type the following command:

umount /

Finally, type the following command. You must include the -f option to force a reboot; otherwise, the kernel enters a state of panic.

reboot -f

This sequence of commands should look like this:

After the Photon OS machine reboots, log in with the new root password.

Resetting the failed logon count

Resetting the root password will not reset the failed logon count, if you’ve had to many failed attempts, you may not be able to logon after resetting the password.

You will know if this is the case, if you see Account locked due to X failed logins at the photon console.

To reset the count, before you unmount the filesystem, run the following…

/sbin/pam_tally2 --reset --user root

3 - Fixing Permissions on Network Config Files

When you create a new network configuration file as root user, the network service might be unable to process it until you set the file mode bits (i.e. chmod) to 644.

If you query the journal with journalctl -u systemd-networkd, you might see the following error message along with an indication that the network service did not start:

could not load configuration files. permission denied

The permissions on the network files might cause this problem. Without the correct permissions, networkd-systemd cannot parse and apply the settings, and the network configuration that you created will not be loaded.

After you create a network configuration file with a .network extension, you must run the chmod command to set the new file’s mode bits to 644. Example:

chmod 644 10-static-en.network

For Photon OS to apply the new configuration, you must restart the systemd-networkd service by running the following command:

systemctl restart systemd-networkd

4 - Permitting Root Login with SSH

The full version of Photon OS prevents root login with SSH by default. To permit root login over SSH, open /etc/ssh/sshd_config with the vim text editor and set PermitRootLogin to yes.

Vim is the default text editor available in Photon OS. The developer version also contains Nano. After you modify the SSH daemon’s configuration file, you must restart the sshd daemon for the changes to take effect.

Example:

vim /etc/ssh/sshd_config

# override default of no subsystems
Subsystem       sftp    /usr/libexec/sftp-server

# Example of overriding settings on a per-user basis
#Match User anoncvs
#       X11Forwarding no
#       AllowTcpForwarding no
#       PermitTTY no
#       ForceCommand cvs server
PermitRootLogin yes
UsePAM yes

Save your changes in vim and then restart the sshd daemon:

systemctl restart sshd

You can then connect to the Photon OS machine with the root account over SSH:

user@ubuntu:~$ ssh root@10.0.0.131

5 - Fixing Sendmail

If Sendmail is not behaving as expected or hangs during installation, it might be because FQDN is not set.

Perform the following steps:

1. Set an FQDN for your Photon OS machine.

2. Run the following commands in the order below:

   echo $(hostname -f) > /etc/mail/local-host-names
   
       cat > /etc/mail/aliases << "EOF"
           postmaster: root
           MAILER-DAEMON: root
           EOF
   
       /bin/newaliases
   
       cd /etc/mail
   
       m4 m4/cf.m4 sendmail.mc > sendmail.cf
   
       chmod 700 /var/spool/clientmqueue
   
       chown smmsp:smmsp /var/spool/clientmqueue