19 Feb
2019
19 Feb
'19
4:31 p.m.
On 2/18/19 11:49 AM, Alan Perry via cctech wrote:
The system does boot the AIX install on one of its
hard disks, but this is
a recycled system and I don't have usernames/passwords for that install.
Does anyone here have a suggestion on how to proceed?
If you've got another Unix-a-like (e.g. Linux works fine) machine kicking
around with SCSI, it's possible to hack up some shell script to 'dd' blocks
from the AIX machine's drive one by one, looking
for stuff that looks like
part of the password file. Then you can save them, edit
them to make the
data appear like a normal Unix passwd file (IBM being IBM, AIX in those
days did things a little differently), and run one of the various password
crackers on the result (e.g. JtR).
That process worked for my 7043-140, anyway. I don't think that the
filesystem for AIX that old is directly supported on anything, so you can't
just mount it like I believe you can more modern releases. Of course if you
have install media, then as someone else mentioned I believe there are ways
of resetting it that way which are (probably) far easier :-)
cheers
Jules