[Discuss] Forgotten users and passwords in Debian

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2007-07-02 20:42-0700 Murray Strome wrote:

> I have an old computer on which I installed Debian some time ago (this was in 
> order to get the library software, Koha, to work).  I have not looked at that 
> computer for many months, and now realize that I have completely forgotten 
> all the user names and passwords and the root password.  Without having to 
> install everything (it took days to get it working the first time because 
> Koha installation is so complicated), I really don't want to try that. I 
> tried booting in Rescue mode, but it wants the root password which I don't 
> remember.
>
> Even if I could get to the list of users, presumably in /etc, it might twig 
> my memory about one or more of the user passwords.
>
> Any ideas?

This is what rescue distros such as tomsrtbt (http://www.toms.net/rb/) or
RIP (http://www.tux.org/pub/people/kent-robotti/looplinux/rip/) are for. I
think you can use Knoppix for rescue as well. When you boot a rescue distro
you ordinarily end up with a working Linux distro in RAM with lots of useful
rescue applications such as mount which can be used to mount the disk
partition that includes /etc.  You can then edit /etc/shadow to completely
remove the password (empty the second colon-delimited field so the first few
letters are "root::").  You should then be able to boot your Ubuntu system
as root with no password and then establish passwords for all your different
accounts (including root).

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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