[22.04LTS] Cannot login after mistakenly removed openssl on an organizational desktop

[razberrydadada]

Hello everyone,
As someone novice to Ubuntu, I need help on how to rescue the OS on my working desktop that is running ubuntu 22.04LTS.
To my understanding, the account that I use to login to the OS is authenticated by a typical account management service from a server in the institution where I work. There is a guest account that is only for one-time use to provide a gui interface to setup a normal account that is supposed to have the "sudo" permission. Once my normal account is set, I can directly login to ubuntu.
Recently I did a bad move when I was kinda sleepy, that the openssl module got mistakenly removed by "apt purge", and what's more from the apt log it seems a lot of related modules also got removed. Many applications stopped functioning at once and I haven't dealt with such case before, so I did another wrong move which was restarting the OS from Gnome. So after the restart, I input my account name and password but the login screen said login authentication was not working anymore, which meant I could not login to Ubuntu with my own account.
I tried Grub menu for system recovery, but found it also need account and password, where my own one didn't work here. Now I can only login to the aforementioned guest account, but there I even could not start up the terminal. Tried write simple shell file to run but seemed the commands could not be executed either. Tried mounting ISO image and the installation wizard did not show up, so no idea how to recover from ISO image now.
I feel like this PC, due to the lack of openssl for supporting the login authentication, is kinda stand alone from the network. And with no account availabe for me to login to install the purged modules back, I could not get the OS back to work.
I could contact with IT administrator for this, but going through the process with back and forth will be a pain. So for now I hope I could either let the OS recover itself from system-menu/ISO/bootable-device, or I could get a way to let terminal work to reinstall the log modules. Could you kindly help me on this?

Many thanks.

[MAFoElffen]

My recommends: I would contact your IT Admin... As a having been a past Corporate Tech Support, you are probably not the first to do something like that.

As it is a machine that probably is setup to fit into it's pwn infrastructure, the version of openssl, and how it is setup may have some tweaks in the configurations to fit into their standards and settings of their infrastructure. If you had not used "--purge", then the config files would still be there (but now mot), then it would still be matching the version of... To match how they are usually using it with their VPN access. SSL cert's are probably just a small piece of that puzzle,

Just reinstalling the openssl package is probably just a piece of that. If this were just your own, and how you were implementing it (in a vacuum), or supporting an Admin in how he was making a plan to use it for his own infrastructure, this would be different. Then you would have control of both ends that need to match settings of...

[MAFoElffen]

Additional on your conversation with your IT Admin:

You are a User given privileges to use their computer in their infrastructure. They probably have a base, standardized image built that they image their computers with. As having done Corporate Technical Support in the past... Mistakes happen. They most likely have a disaster recovery plan. I'm sure worse has happened.

It would probably tickle them to no end, if you asked him what backup software their images include for User Recovery and maintenance... That if you backup your system (as a base backup), and do incremental backups, then if something like this accidentally happens again it might be easier for the both of you, you would have a fallback point to fall back to, and you would not have a prolonged interruption of work...

That would show that you are conscientious and are proactive in making things easier for the both of you. They would probably be very happy to help you with that.

[razberrydadada]

Thank you MAFoElffen for the advices!
It's very helpful to know about how they maintain an image for recovery. You are right it would help a lot if I can keep a base backup followed by incremental ones in similar way that they are doing, I really hope I could have known about this knowledge earlier so I don't have to make so many back and forth this time.