I recently ran into a password booby trap and now am trying to back out of it. If anyone has any suggestions, I would appreciate it.
The problem occurred when the amnesia screen saver kicked in for the first time when I was logged in with persistence. When it appeared, I tried to log back in with my persistence password, but it was refused. Since that is the only saved password that I have ever used, I was now locked out of access to my account. I did not try just rebooting and starting over, as I would lose the work I had done since my last save if I did that.
Eventually, after trying every password I could think of, I tried ‘p’ which worked. That was an old temporary password that I had once used to log in as Administrator. Since I was told that those passwords were single-use, I made no attempt at security when picking them.
Now, however, it seems the screen saver lock-out password is set to that value and I can’t change it. Specifically, I tried ‘passwd amnesia XXXX’ in the terminal, where XXXX was my persistence password, and that was accepted by amnesia, but the screen saver lockout still requires ‘p’.
Can anyone tell me how to change my screen-saver password to the same one I use for persistence?
More on this problem. I recently ran Tails 7.13 on another stick and computer and found that that installation does not use amnesia to lock the screen, so this is not a universal problem
My Tails is also 7.13 but was an earlier version (probably 7.12) when I tripped the trap.
Thanks for the interesting report! Can you confirm that you have the Welcome Screen feature of the Persistent Storage turned on: Tails - Configuring the Persistent Storage
If so, then I think that you got confused twice:
The administration password is reused as screen locker password if you set one. I opened Making sure you're not a bot! to clarify this in our doc and UI.
The Welcome Screen feature of the Persistent Storage includes in the Administration Password. I opened Making sure you're not a bot! to clarify this in our doc and UI as well.
Please have a look at these 2 issues and help me improve them if I misunderstood.
To use the same password for the Persistent Storage and the screen locker, please try to:
Unlock your Persistent Storage in the Welcome Screen.
Disable the Administration Password (which has your ‘p’ from earlier).
Enable the Administration Password and set it to be the same as your Persistent Storage password.
I turned off the welcome screen option and that solved the problem, thank you. I will not turn it back on as I do not need this screen-saver feature.
As to going to ‘Making sure you’re not a bot!’, I did that and got to a GitLab page. What is that all about? (And, by the way, my wife agrees with me that I am not a bot, so it must be true.)