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I am newbee at Pi3B. I installed Jessie at Pi3B board.

Whenever I reboot the board, the pi's password was changed into unknown value. So, I delete pi's password encryption field from /etc/password everytime and reset the password. Then the password remains until I reboot. This is stupid. Can anyone tell me what is wrong on the password ?

P.S. I found similar questions in this forum. But, no answers found yet. I am not using WiFi and my ssh and internet work well after I reset the password.

To change the password for pi, I simply used $passwd command. It seems work well. About the password, user-entered passwod is eventually encrypted and wrote onto the /etc/password file. I tried raspi-config to change pi's password, but, still the same problem.

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    @Totoro DO NOT add detail in comments, edit your question. You need to explain what you mean by "delete pi's password from /etc/password"
    – Milliways
    Oct 8, 2017 at 7:14
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    @Milliways: The password is not stored anywhere, of course, but it is possible to delete a field in /etc/passwd and make the account passwordless. Also, a hash of the password (== a one-way encrytion) will appear in that field after you set one, until pwconv is run, at which point it will be replaced with an x.
    – goldilocks ♦
    Oct 8, 2017 at 14:12
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    In any case @Totoro this is a non-reproducible problem, meaning anyone else who does the same thing will not have the same result. Either the pi is magically cursed, or you have made a mistake or left out some crucial piece of information. You should try a very simple password (abc123) to make sure there is no mistake, and perhaps run sudo pwconv after you set it to make sure there are no hijinx going on there.
    – goldilocks ♦
    Oct 8, 2017 at 14:25
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    The encrypted password is stored in /etc/shadow not in /etc/passwd.
    – 88weighed
    Oct 8, 2017 at 14:37
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    How do you reboot the PI? Which command do you use?
    – NomadMaker
    May 29, 2018 at 4:39

1 Answer 1

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[This is a workaround]

I'm not sure why, but the "pi" SSH password seems to be invalidated upon reboot. Eventually I gave up trying to figure out why and how and worked around this by creating my own user. With this user I can logon after reboot.

Not using the default "pi" user for SSH login may seem to be not too bad from a security perspective anyway.

Hope this helps.

PS: I added my user to the groups "sudo" to install software and "audio" to get the Pi to play sound.

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