On Sun, 2004-05-16 at 17:42, Christopher Sawtell wrote: > On Sunday 16 May 2004 12:25, howard blomfield wrote: > > in all the confusion with cdrom > > cables falling out/not being able to boot from a floppy etc i think i > > have scrambled both root & user passwords > > This should be quite easy to fix. > > Disconnect ( As in pull the plug out ) from the net and boot the 'puter with a > Linux boot-disk. > Mount the partition which has the /etc filesystem on it. /dev/hda9 > (In Howard's case, iirc) > > Edit the file /etc/shadow to remove the second field for the user who has > forgotton his p/w > > Then as the root user change ( for example ):- > > root:$1$mrOheWcA$35ey/kyasdfasdfdfgac/1:12498:0::::: > > to > > root::12498:0::::: > > Root now no longer has any password. > > Recreate the password:- > > passwd
warning , this will change the password of the boot disk, not the gentoo install (unless you chrooted per my previous email, in which case you do not need to fiddle with /etc/shadow anyway.) > > You can now change the users' passwords thus: > passwd Joe > > It's safe to put the 'puter on line again now. ( ok, I am paranoid ) > > Use a sequence of numbers and letters which you will remember but will be > meaningless to others. I use old, abandoned, telephone numbers, and bits of > street names dredged up from the past. Don't use a word from the dictionary, > or a name of any kind. > > Your keyboard problem in Mdk can be solved by selecting a US keyboard. > there is also a utility called xmodmap which you can use to alter key to code > mapping. I believe there is a GUI frontend for it, but I forget the name.
