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Recently I was mucking around with some stuff on my FreeBSD laptop (7.2) and caused my system to lock up completely. Not thinking much of it, I rebooted the system and everything seemed normal. I went about my business and needed to install some software. I tried to ‘su’ on the system (sudo wasn’t yet installed) and got the message “su: who are you?”. Ugh… I took a look at my ‘/etc/passwd’ database and found that it contained parts of ‘/etc/resolv.conf’ and a lot of gibberish. Looks like UFS’s lack of journaling struck again.

Just for grins, I tried to change my password using the ‘passwd’ command and got the same message. After a few Google searches, I ran across the pwd_mkdb command. The man page for this command points you towards ‘/etc/master.passwd’ but again, in my case, it was corrupted. Ugh.

Since I’m an avid user of FreeBSD, I have plenty of systems from which I can copy the password database. So, fingers crossed, I booted my laptop into single user mode and copied the master password database over on a USB flash drive. I then issued the ‘#pwd_mkdb /etc/master.passwd’ command (I copied over the corrupted master password database) and it didn’t return any errors. Fingers still crossed, I rebooted and was pleasantly surprised to no longer see all the “unknown user” messages. After successfully logging in as root, I was able to change my passwords back to what they were using the regular ‘passwd’ command. Whew!