Hi all,

I have a big dilemma on my hands, and am on my last straw trying to solve this. While typing too fast and wanting to change the shell for a given user to prevent SSH access, I ran the following command:

sudo chsh /sbin/nologin

Without specifying the user, it seemed as though it defaulted to making the root shell /sbin/nologin, not good!

I booted into recovery mode, and followed these steps:

mounted /dev/xvda /media/xvda
edited /etc/passwd to change root shell back to /bin/bash
Checked file again, shell set to bin bash
Added user "onestp" to sudoers list as a fallback
ran sudo usermod -s /bin/bash root and was no change, so shell was correct
changed root password to be sure
Exited & rebooted

Now when I SSH in as root I still have no acccess. When I SSH in as user onestp (with sudo ability) and run this command:

sudo su -s /bin/bash root

But when typing in password I still get the error that /sbin/nolong does not exists, so the shell is not changing for user root.

Any ideas on how I can recover access to my VPS as root user?

Thank you,
Simon

What about "sudo -s"? Iirc that doesn't switch to the shell specified for the target user as opposed to su...

Don't really know what's going on there, though. Does it actually now say that "/sbin/nolong" doesn't exist even though you changed root's shell to "/sbin/nologin"?

@hawk7000

Yes it says that it does not exist, even though I set the shell for the user (root in this case).

I booted into recovery, added user onestp to the sudoers list, but now it still says that user onestp is not in the sudoers list.

Something seems so wrong here. I am booting into recovery again, attempting to add the user to the sudoers list. While I am at it I will also change the user onestp's shell to /bash/bin in the hope that I can further fix this issue.

Will let you know what the outcome is. Thank you

Regards,
Simon

I finally solved my issue. It was silly, but here was my issuse:

When logging into the recovery console, I had to mount the /dev/xvda to /media/xvda

HOWEVER, when I was running my commands such as sudo nano /etc/passwd, they were running relative to the RECOVERY IMAGE root and NOT my mounted location.

So, while in the location /media/xvda I ran sudo nano etc/passwd and changed the shell back to /bin/bash for root.

All is well now, and SSH access as root has been restored.

I hope this saves someone hours of trouble some day.

why are you coming into ssh as root? you should have this disabled in ssh.