On Tuesday 29 July 2003 12:00, Winelfred G. Pasamba wrote: > fooler said: > > there is doc :-> the trick and universal way of recovering your password > > and > > applicable to all unix flavor is to remove the disk and mount it to > > another > > pc with the same version of its OS and manipulate the password file > > either by blanking the password column or replace it that comes from the > > other password file :-> > > can you also 000 your UID in FreeBSD? :)
generally, if you can mount the hard drive using some other OS, you can do anything you want. i do that (actually, usually just blanking passwords, but you can also set yourself to uid=0) all the time as an emergency service for people who have forgotten their passwords, or have corrupted their shadow files so that the passwords they remember don't work anymore. if you can get physical access to the box, you can do almost anything you want. my favorite technique is to boot from an install CD (mandrake, usually, but one of these days i'll get a knoppix cd, tomsrtbt is nice too, and i may try to figure out how to make my own boot cd with support for all the filesystems in creation), don't install (just find a shell, the mandrake CD makes that very easy), then mount the hard drive. once it's mounted, you can edit the password and shadow files directly. if you don't have a CD that has support for the particular filesytem (haven't tried mounting FreeBSD drives from the mandrake install CD, for instance), then fooler's solution, to mount the drive on another computer that has the same OS (and therefore can mount that filesystem) works every time. unless the filesystem is encrypted. if someone's lost the key to that, well, i haven't tried that yet, but it's probably impossible to solve. tiger -- Gerald Timothy Quimpo gquimpo*hotmail.com tiger*sni*ph http://bopolissimus.sni.ph an xcdngl nntrstng jrnl Public Key: "gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 672F4C78" They that wait upon the Lord, shall renew their strength; they shall mount up their wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint. Isaiah 40:31 -- Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph . To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug . Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie
