Experiences With Open Source

Our Ubuntu 8.10 in our office could not login after re-setting cups for sharing HP Deskjet printer. There must be something wrong but I didn’t know what. I suspected the gnome thing or the passwd file corrupted during cups setup.
So I ran some steps to recover the password, like trying to boot the kernel in recovery mode but failed because when I tried to log as root, the root that I put in a password before, rejected.
I try to change the kernel boot option became rw single but result nothing.
Finally there is another option like this:

The kernel booted directly to command prompt but with no ubuntu host name. It became like this

but no problem, at least I got the prompt so I try passwd myusername again… but nothing. Ubuntu said can’t resolve the host name.

Then googling again, I looked for error near the cups key search, then some forum said something the erroc caused by samba configuration. Funny thing here, I setup cups but error to samba?

But this is the lucky guess shot. So I remove the libpam-smbpass by:

then restart. And yes the ubuntu is normal again.

So what is the libpam-smbpass anyway? According to http://packages.ubuntu.com/, is pluggable authentication module for SMB/CIFS password database. So there must be something wrong with the samba password later after I removed the libpam-smbpass.

Let’s find out more later because I have not finished checking it out.