Ok, so you say that it asks for a password after doing stop-A. That's probably typical of University machines because it makes it harder for students/staff bypassing privileges.
As someone else said the easiest is probably to zap the OBP settings by playing with the contents of the device outside of the machine. Failing that you need to get logged in a root on the existing OS (Solaris I presume) and then you can reset the password/security settings using the eeprom command. > > On Saturday 13 Aug 2005 21:05, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote: > > John Bowden wrote: > > Got 1 to play with at > > > the moment but it won't finish booting. Stops while it > looks for an > > > ip from dns server. From what I have been told they used > to belong > > > to Wolverhampton university. I suspect that instead of looking for ip/dns it is actually looking for a NIS (Yellow Pages) server. That is what normally causes Solaris/SunOS to hang during boot. The machine probably has a static IP address and may be looking for a specific NIS server. You can get past that point by setting your own NIS server up for the right domain (it will be shown on the console) and setup an interface on the NIS server to serve the correct subnet for the machine. That should get you to the login prompt. All you need to do now is break in a root. I suspect that you will not know the root password for the box so again it gets complicated. NIS might be your friend. The machine will likely be setup to use NIS for passwords if so then you can create an account in the NIS database and that will allow you to login as that user on your box. You will likely not be able to login as "root" because the root password is probably stored locally on the box. But I don't remember if you can create an account called something else ("toor" is a favourite of mine) with a UID of 0 and login as that. Once you are in as root just use the eeprom command to change the settings. Something like eeprom security-mode=none Should be good enough Other ideas. You could pop the nvram/rtc chip out and just turn on the machine without it. OBP will limp along without it and then you can boot from a Solaris cdrom, get to a prompt (just exit the installer), then you can mount the root filesystem and remove the root password and edit /etc/nsswitch.conf ensuring that all mentions of NIS are removed. Then power off, replace the nvram/rtc, power on, let it boot and login as root and use the eeprom command from there. Lots of fun for all the family :-) Hope this helps Richard