Root password contains character that can't be entered

Question

Don't know what happend really. I changed the root password to a long password containing weird characters, and triple checked that I could log in with it, and has been ever since. Until now.

I think the bad character is a ’. How do I enter that in Putty? When I paste the password in Putty, that character and some other are removed/moved. I've set UTF-8 under Window>Translation.

Update: locale returns the following.

LANG=
LC_CTYPE="POSIX"
LC_NUMERIC="POSIX"
LC_TIME="POSIX"
LC_COLLATE="POSIX"
LC_MONETARY="POSIX"
LC_MESSAGES="POSIX"
LC_PAPER="POSIX"
LC_NAME="POSIX"
LC_ADDRESS="POSIX"
LC_TELEPHONE="POSIX"
LC_MEASUREMENT="POSIX"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="POSIX"
LC_ALL=

I've (falsely) assumed it was using UTF-8.

Is there a way to make su read the password from a file?

Update 2: I created two files using Notepad++; ansi.txt and utf8.txt. Both containing the string abc’def

cat ansi.txt prints abcdef
cat utf8.txt prints abcâdef

Dubu · Answer 1 · 2010-10-03T23:54:05.880

1

If the "special" character is in fact an accent char (like ' or ```), I could imagine that your current input method converts this character followed, say, by a vowel into an accented char. Entering ' and e on a German keyboard, e.g., will in many cases result in é, similar for ```` and u resulting in ù. You could try to enter a space directly after the "special" character to prevent such a conversion. No guarantee, just a guess. (And I hope this answer will appear as I see it now in the preview. ;-))

edited Oct 03 '10 at 23:54

answered Oct 03 '10 at 23:34

Dubu

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When I enter `'[space]`, the row transforms into `(arg: 4)`. I can't enter any characters like `åäö`, Putty just chimes angrily at me. I've updated the question – Markus Hedlund Oct 03 '10 at 23:52

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 04 '10 at 00:39

1

Try

#!/bin/sh
su - << _EOF_
password goes here
_EOF_

Put it in a file tmpPassFix then run

chmod +x tmpPassFix
./tmpPassFix

Untested may or may not work. This is assuming you can get password into the "tmpPassFix" file above. I don't know much about encodings, but if you can get it in windows you could do the above and then winscp it over, providing the script works.

answered Oct 04 '10 at 00:39

Joshua Enfield

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`su: must be run from a terminal` unfortunately it did not work – Markus Hedlund Oct 04 '10 at 06:24

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 04 '10 at 06:48

0

Rackspace actually has a Reset Password button. Go to Hosting>Cloud Servers>[Your server] and click the life saving button.

Be aware that it reboots the server, so open the Console and monitor that the system comes online again fine.

answered Oct 04 '10 at 06:48

Markus Hedlund

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Root password contains character that can't be entered

3 Answers3