Bob Taylor wrote:
> Hi, I am writting this message in hope that you can be of a great help
> to me. My husband that has been on this site died suddenly Feb 4th)
> and I can not access my computer. He has a user name and password on
> the system. He has used the Linux and Red Hat to run the
> computer.... He would boot up the system and then I would do my
> email, documents, etc. I never thought to ask him his password or
> username. There is no one in our area that knows how to change the
> username and password on the Linux system... Can you or some one you
> may know help. I did find a Red Hat Boot disk... not sure what to do
> with it!!!!
in a nutshell, you boot the linux CD into 'linux rescue mode', then the
usernames are in the /etc/passwd file on the mounted hard drive, which
is I believe mounted as /a, so it would be /a/etc/passwd, and the
passwords themselves are encrypted in /etc/shadow ... its easiest to
edit /etc/shadow (probably as /a/etc/shadow due to the rescue mount),
then just zap out the password field.
whoever does this has to be reasonably competent with unix command line
tools like vi, there's no gui in the rescue environment.
a typical /etc/passwd file...
root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash
bin:x:1:1:bin:/bin:
....additional system accounts deleted...
nobody:x:99:99:Nobody:/:
pierce:x:500:510:John R Pierce:/home/pierce:/bin/bash
mudshark:x:502:510:Mud E Shark:/home/mudshark:/bin/bash
and the corresponding /etc/shadow file...
root:$**********************z/:13890:0:99999:7:-1:-1:134538772
bin:*:10810:0:99999:7:::
....system accounts trimmed.....
nobody:*:10810:0:99999:7:::
pierce:$******************0:14332:0:99999:7:-1:-1:134539876
mudshark:$*******************x:10815:0:99999:7:-1:-1:134538468
so two users on this systme are pierce and mudshark, everything before
nobody is a system account. I replaced the bulk of the password hash
with ******, you would remove everything between the : so a line would
look like...
root::13890:0:99999:7:-1:-1:134538772
(note there's now two colons between the username and the next field)
now that account can log on without a password.
hopefully you can find someone who knows enough linux to make sense of this.