HELP root password unknown

[Alex Bottonelli @Bull Italia FLM Newton Mass. USA]

In article <28378 at usc>, kjh at pollux.usc.edu (Kenneth J. Hendrickson) writes:
> In article <1990Nov20.094505.896 at ceres.physics.uiowa.edu> rlm at ceres.physics.uiowa.edu writes:
> >Someone (a hacker I suppose) has changed the root password on our ESIX system 
> >- is it possible to access the system to reset this?
> 
> I HOPE NOT.  If there is, then all ESIX systems are terribly insecure.
> ...
> ... 
> In addition, how do we know that you aren't some hacker trying to
> compromise some ESIX system?  :-)
> 

Well if you are not an hacker and you have physical access to the machine,
all unix systems I have played with, so far, can boot a minimal unix kernel
from floppy. If you can do that, you can mount the hard disk root partition,
say under /mnt and do:

		# /mnt/bin/ed /mnt/etc/passwd
		  *blank out the password field for root*
		
		  *reboot from hard disk*
		  *immediately reassign a known password to root*

Easy, isn't it?

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