How to prevent Linux for prompting for new passwords?

[Seren]

When I booted up Mandriva 2006.0 yesterday, it started in graphical mode, runlevel 5 (not the way I'd had it set up) and acted as though it was going through the last part of the operating system install, among other things prompting me for a new root password without asking for the old one.

I have no idea why it did this since I first installed the present installation months ago and have had no problems with it until now.

What disturbs me is that Mandriva spontaneously and without previous warning prompted for a new root password, so anyone could have gotten in at that point.

Do any of you have any idea why Mandriva might have gone into install mode like that, and what I might do to prevent if from doing so in the future? This has seriously given me the willies. It's the first time I've ever had this happen with any distro, and if I can't determine that it's distro-independent, I may have to switch away from Mandriva just to have peace of mind.

[sarumont]

What probably happened is the root account had/has a password expiration on it. Typically, though, you are prompted for a new password immediately after login with the old, and you should be warned each login for a certain number of days in advance.

-x, --maxdays MAX_DAYS
Set the maximum number of days a password remains valid. After MAX_DAYS, the password is required
to be changed.

[Seren]

What probably happened is the root account had/has a password expiration on it. Typically, though, you are prompted for a new password immediately after login with the old, and you should be warned each login for a certain number of days in advance.

I checked my settings and at the time I had that problem, root's password was set not to expire (set to 99999) and was set up with a 7 day warning for expiration.

[Seren]

It seems to me as though some parameter or variable got changed to something it should have been, and that triggered a subroutine in Mandriva that ran the last part of the installation. Beyond that, I can't think why this might have happened.