HELP root password unknown

[Ralf Holighaus]

kjh at pollux.usc.edu (Kenneth J. Hendrickson) writes:

>In article <1990Nov20.094505.896 at ceres.physics.uiowa.edu> rlm at ceres.physics.uiowa.edu writes:
>>Someone (a hacker I suppose) has changed the root password on our ESIX system 
>>- is it possible to access the system to reset this?

>I HOPE NOT.  If there is, then all ESIX systems are terribly insecure.
>I hope you have to have each user backup their stuff, and re-load the OS
>off of the original disks and/or tapes.  I hope this not to wish you a
>terrible lot of work, but because I am thinking about ESIX, and I
>wouldn't want such an insecure system.

>In addition, how do we know that you aren't some hacker trying to
>compromise some ESIX system?  :-)

>-- 

Actually, I think there might be the same possibility as on a SCO system:
Maybe you have an Emergency Boot Disk. Use this disk to bood, mount the
filesystem of the hard disk and modify /etc/passwd there to remove the
password entry of root. Then boot off the hard disk and enter a new passwd
immediately for root.

Rgds
Ralf Holighaus
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