Shadow password file

[Vaughn Treude]

Thanks!  Worked like a charm.  Another use for Knoppix.

BTW, I apologize for starting this thread on plug-devel.  I'm on both lists 
and being a bit lazy, I usually post by replying to a random message and 
changing the subject.  Didn't notice it was one of those devel messages.

Vaughn

On Wednesday 03 December 2003 10:18, you wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-12-03 at 04:50, Vaughn Treude wrote:
> > I have a machine on which I have lost the root password.  (Doh!)  I was
> > looking for a workaround to reinstallation.  I was thinking I could boot
> > it with Knoppix and replace the shadow password file.  As a test, I
> > looked at the shadow password files on two different machines that
> > happend to be the same distro and have the same root password.  The
> > encrypted entries for the root password were different!  I can understand
> > this would be a security feature, but does anybody know of a wayI could
> > get my workaround scheme to work?
>
> They have different ciphertext entries because they have different
> salts.  A "salt" is added to make precomputing all the possible
> ciphertexts impractical.
>
> You can indeed boot off a CD, mount your partition on /mnt, then edit
> /mnt/etc/shadow and just blank out the second field for root.
>
> When you reboot, you will be able to login as root with no password.
>
> HTH,

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