root password / access gone after update

[Herodot]

Hi,

I have a small intranet webserver on my LAN. I only connect to it with ssh, as it's placed somewhere akward and doesn't have a monitor. Yesterday I did an "emerge -u world", and today I can no longer log in with ssh. It's still running fine, and the emerge is over. I don't know exactly what got updated, but it was only small things and minor updates, or I wouldn't have done it all at once.

What can I do?
_________________
Excelsior!

[mglauche]

try to login as a normal user (you do have some non-root accounts, do u ? , then try su - (if that user belongs to group wheel)

if nothing helps, use the folowing procedure to reset the root password (oh, u need to attach a monitor first

reboot the machine, and in add "init=/bin/sh" to your command line in grub or lilo

then use "mount / -o remount,rw"
then "passwd root" - set the new password, maybe run "sync" to flush the filesystem
then remount the / read-only again with "mount / -o remount,ro" and reboot your computer (just hit reset after you did remount it ro)

[jlg]

my guess is you updated ssh and that by default the new sshd_config disables root to login from ssh