Text 259, 42 rader
Skriven 2007-01-08 22:32:20 av Maurice Kinal (1:261/38.9)
    Kommentar till text 258 av Bob Ackley (1:2905/3)
Ärende: Boot problem
====================
Hey Bob!

Jan 07 06:34 07, Bob Ackley wrote to Anyone:

 BA> does anyone have a clue how to circumvent those checks and wake the 
 BA> thing up?

You probably would need a boot disk that has no password for the root account
OR a boot disk that you know the root password for and then from that mount the
disk and edit it's /etc/passwd which should have an entry that looks something
like;

    root:x:0:0::/root:/bin/csh

Get rid of the 'x' in the second field so it looks like;

    root::0:0::/root:/bin/csh

and then reboot without the floppy disk in place so that the drive now boots
up.  Then login as root (no password), replace the x in the second field and
run 'passwd' and give root a password you want it to have.  After that then any
other accounts in /etc/passwd can be altered but the root account by running
'passwd accoutname' and give them whatever password you think they should have.

If the above doesn't work chances are that booting a system from a floppy
doesn't work since the former sysadmin has that feature turned off for security
purposes so that the above couldn't be done (for REALLY good reasons too
although that doesn't help you any).  You'll need to know how to reset the
system then, and in the case of PC's it is either jumpered or reset simply by
disconnecting the battery for a minute or so and then rebooting the machine and
getting into the bios to reset everything there.  That is how to defeat bios
passwords on PC's.  Not sure about how to do that on your particular purchase
since I've never encountered one.  Bottomline is you'll need to get rid of
root's password first before you can take control of the rootfs.

Does that make sense?

Life is good,
Maurice

--- Msged/LNX 6.2.0
 * Origin: The Pointy Stick Society XXIX - Only one I in teamwork (1:261/38.9)