Root password problems

I would love to have several days, but this is a business system that has to
get up ASAP. The other odd thing is that when I copy the file the owner is
shadow. Does any one know why this would happen. If I am in a shell why am I
not root?

David

-----Original Message-----
From: plug-discuss-admin@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
[mailto:plug-discuss-admin@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us]On Behalf Of
technomage
Sent: Saturday, July 12, 2003 1:14 PM
To: plug-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
Subject: Re: Root password problems


can you copy the shadow files off?
if so, get another box, use john the ripper and sit back for a while (it may
take anywhere from 2 hours to several days to break the passwords).

Mage

On Saturday 12 July 2003 12:57 pm, David Demland wrote:
> I have a few Debian boxes, and a FreeBSD box, that no one knows the root
> password for. I have booted with an init=/bin/sh then tried passwd. This
> has worked only on one of the boxes. The rest get an error message of:
>
> passwd: Authentication token manipulation error
>
> My research shows that I should backup the shadow file and run the pwconv
> command to regenerate the shadow file. I can not do this on these machines
> because they have mounted the root file system as read-only and will not
> allow me to update the shadow file. What do I have to do to fix this
> problem so I can run the passwd command on these machines?
>
> David
>
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