Sunday, May 1, 2016

Cannot set password for user with adduser

Recently with my Banana Pi M3 I was having multiple issues while installing. One of them was an error message when trying to set up a new user. See the error message below.

Current password:
New password:
New password (again):
passwd: Authentication token manipulation error
passwd: password unchanged

Smyptoms

When adding a new user with
sudo adduser $user
The system does not accept a password and produces the above message.

Solution

I have found that removing the (non existing ?) password from the user is the only way to solve the problem quickly. It is a weird thing, I have no clue what is causing this.
While logged in as any user with root privileges (sudo), delete the $user password,
sudo passwd -d $user
And set a new password for $user,
sudo passwd $user
It should work now.

Credit goes to Askubuntu.com. Thanks!

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