newbie: login with no password. Help!

[Romeyn Prescott]

At 11:59 AM -0500 12/11/04, wulf scribbled:
>I'm not sure about whether you'll need to do a reinstall. I don't quite
>understand what Gabriel is suggesting. If I were in that situation, I'd
>probably try to boot the machine from a Live-CD distro, mount the
>hard-drive, and see what I could do from there (-chroot- comes to mind
>but I'd have to look it up to say more).
>

Boot from Knoppix or some other LiveCD...or even a rescue floppy. 
Mount your filesystem and edit /etc/shadow.  Find your username entry 
and delete the password hash.  For example, fir a user "fred" you'll 
see an entry looking something like:

fred:$1$zeW7t1ge$0RUxnN2RsbiWPJOcYVpF/0:12746:0:99999:7:::

Delete everything between the 1st and 2nd colons so you have:

prescor::12746:0:99999:7:::

Reboot normally and login as 'fred' using no password.  Then set a password!

>However, assuming you do get a user account sorted out you can then
>configure the login manager to let that person log in automatically.
>That would be the "right" way of circumventing the login security; you
>need a user account to fit into the filesystem permissions structure.
>

What he said.  :-)

...ROMeyn
-- 
signat-url: http://www2.potsdam.edu/prescor/signat-url.htm