VMware Photon OS: Authentication token lock busy

Recently, we faced an issue when trying to reset the Orchestrator root password.

Obviously, we followed the official way to reset it but somehow it wasn’t going well.

Procedure to reset the root password

• In the vSphere Web Client, restart the guest operating system of the appliance.
• Click the console and wait for the Photon screen to appear.
• Press e to go to the GNU GRUB boot menu editor. The GNU GRUB menu remains on the screen for several seconds before it starts the boot sequence.
• Use the arrow keys to go to the line that begins with linux and append the init=/bin/bash string at the end of the line.

• To boot the system, press Ctrl+X or F10.
• To reset the root account password, enter the passwd commands in the console.
• Enter a new password, then reenter the same password to confirm the change.

Problem

As soon as we provided the new password, it failed with the error “Authentication token lock busy”. We even tried changing the password length, made it more complex but nothing helped.

Solution

One thing that worked for us was to remount the root partition using mount command.

mount -o remount,rw /

Remount the Root Partition: If the root partition is mounted as read-only, this command will remount it as read/write and will let you change the password.