[TriLUG] Locked Out of Debian Buster Following Many Updates

[Brian Henning via TriLUG]

Hi Gang,

Well, it's a stinky pickle I find myself in today.  Here's the story:

I wanted to install ripperx to rip a CD.  So I did a sudo apt-get update (like you do) in preparation of an apt-get install.

apt-get update listed some repo metadata changes that I must accept manually, so I did it again this way, based on some googling:

sudo apt-get update --allow-releaseinfo-change

That led to quite a few hits and no errors.  So I moved on to sudo apt-get install ripperx and that's when the proverbial excrement struck the windmachine.

500-some-odd packages updated, 100-some-odd newly installed, some-other-hundreds not updated.  Well, okay, that sounds scary but let's do this.  [enter]

Naturally lots of messages scrolled by, not all of which looked (in the brief moment before they scrolled out of view) like successful things.  Then, eventually, an installation script failed because perl couldn't load libssl.so.1.

At this point I'm dropped back to a prompt, so I think...huh, well, let's see if apt can recover itself.  So I do "sudo apt-get install ripperx" again and...

sudo: account validation failure, is your account locked?

...uh oh.  Okay, try "su -" and...authentication failed.  No password prompt, just a delay followed by a failure.  Eek.

Then I dropped out to a text mode login (Ctrl-F1) and entered "root" for the user.  No password prompt, and failure.  Then I entered my unprivileged username.  No password prompt, and failure.

Um....now what?  I tried to reboot, and see several services fail to start; OpenSSH being one of them (I assume that libssl.so.1 is still MIA at this point).  I can get a text mode login, but the same behavior (never a password prompt, always an authentication failure).  X won't start.

Recovery mode doesn't get me any further.

So I'm to the point of booting from installation media and getting into a shell/chroot that way, but ...then what?  I have no idea what's actually wrong or how to fix it.  I'm really not keen to do a fresh installation if I don't have to, because I have a lot of finicky development environments and stuff.  And of course I don't have a drop-in-and-go backup of the system in its working state...

Any ideas?

Thanks,
-Brian