Accidentally removed my admin account

[Persephone]

@cscs

cat /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

I limited mirrors to 4 after the update of all mirrors.

    ~  ls -la /etc/pacman.d/                                                                                                                           ✔ 
total 24
drwxr-xr-x   3 root root  4096 Sep 28  2023 .
drwxr-xr-x 118 root root 12288 Nov 16 15:15 ..
drwxr-xr-x   5 root root  4096 Nov 16 05:18 gnupg
-rw-r--r--   1 root root   543 Nov 16 16:30 mirrorlist
    ~  cat /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist                                                                                                                    ✔ 
##
## Manjaro Linux default mirrorlist
## Generated on 2024-11-16 16:30
##
## Please use 'pacman-mirrors -f [NUMBER] [NUMBER]' to modify mirrorlist
## (Use 0 for all mirrors)
##

## Country : United_States
Server = https://opencolo.mm.fcix.net/manjaro/stable/$repo/$arch

## Country : United_States
Server = https://mnvoip.mm.fcix.net/manjaro/stable/$repo/$arch

## Country : Bulgaria
Server = https://mirror.telepoint.bg/manjaro/stable/$repo/$arch

## Country : Greece
Server = https://ftp.cc.uoc.gr/mirrors/linux/manjaro/stable/$repo/$arch

    ~  sudo pacman -Syuv                                                                                                                               ✔ 
[sudo] password for alexandra: 
Root      : /
Conf File : /etc/pacman.conf
DB Path   : /var/lib/pacman/
Cache Dirs: /var/cache/pacman/pkg/  
Hook Dirs : /usr/share/libalpm/hooks/  /etc/pacman.d/hooks/  
Lock File : /var/lib/pacman/db.lck
Log File  : /var/log/pacman.log
GPG Dir   : /etc/pacman.d/gnupg/
Targets   : None
:: Synchronizing package databases...
error: failed to synchronize all databases (unexpected error)```

[cscs]

@Persephone

`error: failed to synchronize all databases (unexpected error)````

You know … I was just looking and at the bottom of the /etc/passwd you might be missing

alpm:x:953:953:Manjaro Linux Package Management:/:/usr/bin/nologin

Please add this as the last line (plus an empty newline) to the /etc/passwd file.

Click here for steps to open/edit file

You can just open the file with kate.
Via a command: kate /etc/passwd
Or you can use sudo and terminal editor like nano.
sudo nano /etc/passwd

Then attempt running pacman again;

sudo pacman -Syu

[Persephone]

I don’t have that line, you are right. What is the command to write that to the file, please?

[cscs]

You can do so with any editor.

(Also see the “Click here…” section in the previous post.)

But if you want to copy/paste something this should work;

printf 'alpm:x:953:953:Manjaro Linux Package Management:/:/usr/bin/nologin\n' | sudo tee -a /etc/passwd

Running that command prints the quoted string, including a newline \n, then uses sudo and tee -a to append it to the bottom of that file.

You can also inspect it after any changes to verify with something like

cat /etc/passwd

If I’m right pacman should work directly after the change.

[Persephone]

    ~  printf 'alpm:x:953:953:Manjaro Linux Package Management:/:/usr/bin/nologin\n' | sudo tee -a /etc/passwd
alpm:x:953:953:Manjaro Linux Package Management:/:/usr/bin/nologin
    ~  sudo pacman -Syu                                               ✔ 
:: Synchronizing package databases...
 core is up to date
 extra is up to date
 multilib is up to date
:: Starting full system upgrade...
 there is nothing to do

Thank you so much!

[cscs]

Hurrah!
So much more exciting than backups.
Happy penguining.

[merlock]

@Persephone, from reading this thread, you need to develop a better strategy for dealing with *.pacnew files, instead of blindly overwriting them.

Arch Wiki