Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

More lovely lovely Unix stuff!

F

frescies

macrumors regular
Original poster
Dec 9, 2002
225
0
Los Angeles, CA
I have been doing a lot of fun stuff on the terminal level (and in X11) on my mac and I am learning a lot of the Unix commands, thanks mostly to your input, everyone.

Thanks guys!!

GUESS WHAT I FOUND!!

An old AT&T computer with a good copy of UNIX system V ver. 3.2.2 installed!!! I boot it up and everything is running great. Unfortunately the login and password are still set and the company it came from has gone out of business and I have no way of knowing the login and password :( :(

Is there anyway for me to reset the login and password on the computer? I hope so! this thing looks like fun.


Thanks for all your help guys,
David
 
Wow...

I've never seen the google groups section of google. Its soo cool!!! It actually archives message boards and whatnot perfectly!

Thanks for the tip yzedf!

I found a bunch of answers there. Evidently most techniques require booting off the first floppy (of seven) of the OS install disks. Doing so allows access to

/dev/dsk/0s1 on the hard drive and allows you to modify the root entry.

At this time I don't have any disks for System V, but I think I can attach the hard drive to another computer and boot it up. If its NTFS or FAT I can access the file and change it there (or deleting it should allow loging in as "root" with no password)

Perhaps I could hack it too. I believe, though it is dangerous, if you mess with some of the more benign files, the system will recronstruct certain resources.... again, reseting root to a no password string.

If anybody has any ideas, I'd appreciate your input!!

Thanks yzedf
 
it will probably be NFS. best bet wouyld be to attach it to your mac, then delete/mod from there. just speculating
 
AHAH!!!

I got it! Theres a jumper on the motherboard to reset passwords.... its way underneath everything (hardrive, floppy drive, and a handful of nubus cards). However, I didnt use the jumper.... I was sure it was for a BIOS password and had nothing to do with the UNIX login.

So I was just frustrating myself until late last night, thinking I could GUESS the password for the root login.

Indeed I did!

Login: root (of course)
Password: r00t1

Good guess, I guess.

Now.... Whats the safest way to turn the thing off? Can I just switch it off? or is there a shutdown procedure?
 
shadow file

You can try edditing the shadow and passwd files.

attach the UNIX boot disk to you Mac as a second drive.

go into that drive and eddit the entries for root on the files ~/etc/shadow and ~/etc/passwd

you can copy and past the encripted passwords from the same files on your Mac's boot drive. (as long as you authenticated the root user all ready)

Then when you put the UNIX drive back, the root password will be the same as your Mac's

Edit:

I guess you fixed your problem before I finnished typing this... oh well :) have fun!
 
In the linux world I use:

$ shutdown -h now

To be honest, I don't know for the true UNIX stuff... as there are a few key differences.
 
Re: AHAH!!!

Originally posted by frescies
I got it! Theres a jumper on the motherboard to reset passwords.... its way underneath everything (hardrive, floppy drive, and a handful of nubus cards). However, I didnt use the jumper.... I was sure it was for a BIOS password and had nothing to do with the UNIX login.

So I was just frustrating myself until late last night, thinking I could GUESS the password for the root login.

Indeed I did!

Login: root (of course)
Password: r00t1

Good guess, I guess.

Now.... Whats the safest way to turn the thing off? Can I just switch it off? or is there a shutdown procedure?
Click to expand...

AAAgh! Someone actually used "r00t1" for their ROOT PASSWORD? I hope this computer wasn't used for anything at all sensitive (or, even better, wasn't on a network). I mean, that's even worse than my user password (my root one is a good deal better) and I'm don't store anything sensitive on my machine.
 
Re: AAArgh

This computer wasn't used for anything important.... Just the storage of voicemail messages for an emergency medical office and NFS storage for some emergency medical workstations.

Aye, r00t1 is a horrible password.

You say that your root password is a good deal better ay?

login: root
Password: root?

There are some neat files on the machine. Somebody stuffed some very personal crap in the /bin directory, where it doesn't belong. Now I'm off to hunt down some software and write some networking stuff for it. I'm gonna use this baby to study UNIX for an upcomming job.

-David
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back