On 02/01/2018 02:28 PM, Tapley, Mark via cctech wrote:
Is there a standard procedure for recovering lost passwords for these systems, or for resetting passwords? I do have physical access to the machine; it’s possible I can find an AIX install disk but it’s *highly* desirable to preserve the contents of the existing hard drive.
I want to say that my machine's a 43P-140, too (and I actually have a pair of them, but one has some form of hardware fault)
Anyway, for mine, I seem to remember putting the drive into one of my SGIs (I didn't have a PC with SCSI on this side of the Atlantic) and writing a little script which read the drive block-by-block, saving any to the SGI which looked like they might be file fragments containing root password entries.
That gave me ten or so blocks, which I then moved over to a Linux PC (which had a little more CPU power than the SGI). AIX's password file format is a little different to that of everyone else (of course), so I had to tweak the data to get it into the right format. From there, it was just a case of running a Unix password cracker and it just took a minute or two to find the root password.
I forget now which version of AIX I have; I remember that the password mechanism changed at some point (and 99% of the information I found at the time via Google related to a different version; it was hard to find details on the one that I have)
cheers Jules
