problems to install SSH & OPENSSH in Ubuntu 9.10

[Colin Law]

2010/1/10 Felipe Gaúcho <fgaucho at gmail.com>:
> I am trying to install & configure ssh & openssh-server, but I have
> the following problem:
>
>
> :~$ sudo apt-get install openssh-server openssh-client
>
> Reading package lists... Done
> Building dependency tree
> Reading state information... Done
> openssh-server is already the newest version.
> openssh-client is already the newest version.
> 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
> 1 not fully installed or removed.
> After this operation, 0B of additional disk space will be used.
> Setting up openssh-server (1:5.1p1-6ubuntu2) ...
> useradd: cannot lock /etc/passwd; try again later.
> adduser: `/usr/sbin/useradd -d /var/run/sshd -g nogroup -s
> /usr/sbin/nologin -u 124 sshd' returned error code 1. Exiting.
> dpkg: error processing openssh-server (--configure):
>  subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
> Errors were encountered while processing:
>  openssh-server
> E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
>

A google search for 'ubuntu ssh server cannot lock etc passwd'
suggests that sometimes the password file can be left locked, which
gives the symptom seen.  There are suggestions that entering, in a
terminal:
sudo rm /etc/*.lock
may solve the problem, though I cannot vouch for this.

Colin