If you have physical access to the machine, and can boot from a floppy, get yourself a copy of Tom's Root Boot (www.toms.net/rb/home.html) - every Sys Admin should have one of these to hand anyway. Boot with this, and mount the root partition of the box (eg as /mnt) vi /mnt/etc/shadow The first line will look like this: root:AAAAAAAAAAAA:11452:0:10000:::: Note that AAAAAAAAAAAA will be replaced with a seemingly random series of characters, this is the encrypted version of the root password. Remove that series of characters, and reboot without the floppy Log straight in as root (there will now be no root password) and use passwd to set the password. On Thu, 2001-09-13 at 09:02, Gabriele Biondo wrote:
month ago i read that there is a way to gain the root privileges' over a linux box - with a little trick. Now, i do not remember that trick, but one of our sysadmins left the company and he doesn't want to give back that password. Is there anyone that knows that little trick? Is there anyone that knows how to configure lilo to protect from that trick? -- James Ogley, Unix Systems Administrator, Pinnacle Insurance Plc james.ogley@pinnacle.co.uk www.pinnacle.co.uk +44 (0) 20 8731 3619 Using Free Software since 1994, running GNU/Linux (SuSE 7.x) This email was created and sent with Ximian Evolution 0.13
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