Authentication Password

[Peter Teuben]

On 11/04/2010 08:51 AM, Stephen wrote:
> I'm using Ubuntu 9.10. I can't for the life of me remember my
> Authentication Password. In System- User Settings my name, login name
> and home directory are shown. Manage Groups is in dark print, but when I
> click on it only Help or Close are highlighted. When I click on Click to
> make changes, I'm asked to authenticate my password. That is my problem,
> I don't know it. I can't even upgrade to the new version of Ubuntu from
> the Update Manager because it needs to be authenticated by my password.
> I'm hoping that there's a simple way to overcome this problem?
>
> Stephen
>
>

I presume you must have set up your Ubuntu with automated login,
otherwise you could not even work..... in that case the only generic way is
to rescue boot and either edit the proper /etc/shadow
file, e.g. blank it, if that's allowed. Or perhaps another trick is to have
somebody make a new dummy account with known password, and cut
and paste the encrypted password in the proper /etc/shadow file.
You'll need some unix skills, first of all, /etc/shadow will probably not be
in /etc, but in some other /media/blabla/etc/shadow, and it will be
write protected, so use chmod +w to temporarely change it.

If you're lucky, you can use chroot from the rescue to make your
ubuntu the default root, in which case it will be /etc/shadow and you
could perhaps even use the special vipw command for this purpose.

This is what comes to my mind, others can chime in. I'm only a casual
ubuntu user since 10.10, coming from Fedora, so perhaps there is even
a special ubuntu procedure to do in quick ubuntu steps what I described
here in more generic linux steps (i.e any rescue cd should work).

don't forget to also google this issue, it comes up often enough i imagine

good luck

peter