Re: Interactive Unix password recovery

In article <47ffd7d4$0$756$5a6aecb4@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Andrew Gabriel <andrew@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <19bfd1f5-012c-4d39-8089-9389ddc20d89@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
cgebert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
I have an ancient Interactive Unix box with an application still
running on it. The passwords were lost long ago. I need to change
the IP address on it. Is there any way to recover the lost password?

Rummaging around at the back of my brain, I think you boot it
with the "-i s" option to boot single user. I can't recall if
it asks for a password in single user mode -- most unixes didn't
used to back then. If it does, that isn't going to help.

The other option is to boot the install floppy which I think
works up to about ISC 4.0 and gives you a floppy based system with
a root shell (remember when unixes would run from a floppy? ;-)
IIRC, 4.0.1 and 4.1 could no longer fit a system onto the floppy
and you couldn't do this anymore.

--
Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]

Another old trick is to hook the disk to a Linux box with support for
the correct filesystem type in it and to mount the drive and edit the
password/shadow file. Done this with some SCO boxes successfully with
the SysV filesystem. Don't think this would do any good with the SCO
XFS (not the same as the SGI XFS).

Bill
--
--
Be comforted that in the face of all erridity and disallusionment, and
despite the changing fortunes of time, there is always a big future in
computer maintainance. --Deteriorata (pechter-at-gmail-dot-com)
.

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