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I am a newbie with xNix OS's and I am at a hurdle I can't seem to conquer presently. &nbsp;I installed Fedora Core 9 on a VM instance and I was never prompted for root password (that I can remember). &nbsp;At any rate, I'm in the shell and I can't seem to get it to accept my reset commands. &nbsp;see the following sequence:<br />
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sh-3.2# passwd root<br />
passwd: no record of root in /etc/shadow, using /etc/passwd<br />
Changing password for root<br />
New password:<br />
Retype password:<br />
passwd: cannot update password file /etc/shadow<br />
sh-3.2# 
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I am a newbie with xNix OS's and I am at a hurdle I can't seem to conquer presently.  I installed Fedora Core 9 on a VM instance and I was never prompted for root password (that I can remember).  At any rate, I'm in the shell and I can't seem to get it to accept my reset commands.  see the following sequence:

sh-3.2# passwd root
passwd: no record of root in /etc/shadow, using /etc/passwd
Changing password for root
New password:
Retype password:
passwd: cannot update password file /etc/shadow
sh-3.2# 

Trouble resetting root password

Linux is a UNIX-like open source operating system with hundreds of distinct distributions, including: Fedora, openSUSE, Ubuntu, Debian, Slackware, Gentoo, CentOS, and Arch Linux. Linux is generally associated with web and database servers, but has become popular in many niche industries and applications.

Linux

The Linux operating system, in all its flavors, has its own share of security flaws that allow intrusions, but there are various mechanisms by which these flaws can be removed, generally divided into two parts: authentication and access control. Authentication is responsible for ensuring that a user requesting access to the system is really the user with the account, while access control is responsible for controlling which resources each account has access to and what kind of access is permitted.