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[LUG] Glueing the peices of my broken life, err, server



It's been a long few weeks!

You might remember a little while back I posted
several messages trying to figure out what the hell
was up with my web server.  With your help, I
correctly identified it as hard disk corruption and we
managed to back up the whole drive just in time - the
drive gave up the ghost shortly afterwards!

Anyway, the hard disk has been replaced and my RaQ
reloaded.  Great, just restore the backups and my
server will be exactly how it was before.  Except that
"as before" means corrupted and generally broken!

So I'm trying to just restore the config files as
necessary, not the binaries.  I started by restoring
everything in /etc, that seemed like a good place to
start.  Is there anything else I should restore?
(apart from /home)

My current problem concerns authentication.  My
services on my server (including email) seem to use
PAM for authentication.  When I try to check my emails
(via POP/qpopper), for instance, it says:

"-ERR [AUTH] PAM authentication failed for user "ray":
Authentication service cannot retrieve authentication
info. (9)"

The entries in /etc/passwd currently look a bit like
this:

"ray:x:191:100:Raymond:/home/sites/site19/users/ray:/bin/badsh"

I understand that the "x" represents the password, as
it is then looked up in /etc/shadow.  Except that the
entries in /etc/shadow don't seem to have a password
either!

"ray:x:12201:0:99999:7:::"

I reset the password for my own user, "netacclaim",
and could consequently log in without problems.

Any idea how I can restore my user's passwords?

Cheers,

Jon

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