3 Feb
2018
3 Feb
'18
7:08 a.m.
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