bug#35996: User account password got locked when booting old generation

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Florian,

"pelzflorian (Florian Pelz)" <address@hidden> skribis:

> After I booted to a Guix install USB, chrooted as described on the
> Arch wiki and started a Guix daemon, I could reconfigure as before.
> There was no need to fiddle with grub-install.
>
> After multiple reconfigures, it happened again, my /etc/shadow has !
> again in the password field.  My recently changed root password became
> empty as well, like 35902.  I did not even run sudo concurrently.  The
> password just got locked.

What were the differences between your config files when you
reconfigured?

Did the config files describe the exact same set of user accounts?

Did the user accounts in the config files differ in any way?

Were the user accounts altered in any way in between reconfigures
(‘passwd’, ‘usermod’, GNOME, etc.)?


Looking at ‘user+group-databases’ in (gnu build accounts), which takes a
list of <user-account> and a list of <user-group> to produce
/etc/{passwd,shadow,group}, the only way this could happen is if
/etc/shadow does not exist at the time of reconfigure.

In that case, ‘user+group-databases’ assumes we’re starting anew, so it
creates /etc/shadow with the initial passwords specified in the OS
config.  At that point, the other passwords are lost forever.

Does Shadow or gnome-control-center or something remove /etc/shadow
altogether while it’s accessing it?

At the very least, adding locking like you suggested should avoid this
class of problems; I’ll look into that.

> From 1eb7699d5036062993a080393bfb4a46d2dc1bea Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
> From: Florian Pelz <address@hidden>
> Date: Mon, 3 Jun 2019 07:19:20 +0200
> Subject: [PATCH 1/2] =?UTF-8?q?Add=20cracklib=E2=80=99s=20password=20dicti?=
>  =?UTF-8?q?onary=20to=20cracklib=E2=80=99s=20default=20output.?=
> MIME-Version: 1.0
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
>
> * gnu/packages/password-utils.scm (cracklib): Use `make dict`.

[...]

> From c7c016adc34c591febd0d3630f32dbecdd20ad7c Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
> From: Florian Pelz <address@hidden>
> Date: Sun, 2 Jun 2019 20:01:23 +0200
> Subject: [PATCH 2/2] Make gnome-control-center find passwd binary.
>
> * gnu/packages/gnome.scm (gnome-control-center): Substitute correct path to
>   passwd.

Great, applied both.

Thank you!

Ludo’.