SUMMARY - sort of: UH oh! Problem with root password

From: Lawrence Pesce (lfp@alpha.rwu.edu)
Date: Tue Dec 15 1998 - 15:50:52 CST


I want to thank everyone who responded. I had quite a few!

The almost unanimous fix was to do a Stop-A, then reboot in single user mode
from CDrom. After boot , mount / as /a then manually remove root password
from /a/etc/shadow and then boot from disk...and of course reset the root
password after it worked.

Unfortunately, the customer does not realize what a severe problem this is,
if the server were to crash, or mysteriously reboot - the only "users" on
the system are root and myself. Not only that, they do not want me to fix
it! They have delusions that they are going to buy a new Ultra 10, and put
thier firewall, HP OpenView management station, and company wide information
system all on the same box.

I told them (in so many words) that they were fools, and that they needed to
rethink thier plan, and get this problem fixed ASAP.

Back to the solution: I didn't get to try it on the actual problem machine,
but I did do a test on my own SS5 with the same OS configuration. It
worked, except for one thing: I had to edit the /etc/default/login file and
make sure that the PASSREQ=YES
entry was commented out. In my case it was there, so a-commenting I went.

So yes. It works.

Thanks again. :)

- Larry



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:12:53 CDT