After a bit of fun, some hardware work, and a few reboots, I finally got one of our Solaris 8 Sun Sparc 20 units to work again.

I had been using it for a guinea pig as it was merely important, not critical. I successfully installed half a dozen programs on it, some of which were quite complex! Then I changed the default shell for the root user to bash. Worked great! Except...

The path got mangled. Hmmm. Let's try to make that root user default to an interactive bash shell that retains the full path of a standard user.

Adding the -i parameter to the passwd file line for root was NOT a good idea. Seems that while it knows what /bin/bash is, it simply cannot deal with /bin/bash -i

Thus, the next time I tried to test it by logging into root, it failed!

Su: No shell found.

oops and darn.

So - boot to the install CD to get a clean environment, mount the hard drive, edit the passwd file, and reboot! Simple, eh?

It would have been if the CD drive hadn't been bad. :(

This morning we swapped the CD Drive for another one, rebooted to the CD, made the fix, exited, and all was well with the world!

I'll not be tinkering with root's default shell anymore,either!