21 May
2000
21 May
'00
1:33 p.m.
I had a similar problem with my Sun machine. What I did was physically mount
the foreign drive on my clone running redhat. I knew what the solaris
filesystem was and so was able to instruct redhat to mount it (read only).
Then a friend in ClassicComp turned me on to a program called 'John the
Ripper'. I copied the /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow files to my clones' drive
and ran the program to crack the passwords. The root password was not
crackable but most others were. As the clock on my Sparcstation had a dead
batt, the dateas irrational for the user I logged on as as that user had not
yet been created.... This caused solaris to drop me to a root prompt at which
time I was able to change the root pw and have full system access in the proper
way with the proper date.
Hmm, you must have been lucky, and the system didnt have its EEPROM security
features turned on. The standard way to hack VERY old Sun's, used to
be to boot the computer with a hardware fault that the operating system
couldnt solve and which it would then drop you into local root, and then
fix the hardware problem. Traditionally, one would unplug the keyboard
before powering on the system ;) The fix for this hardware problem is
left as an extra credit problem for you to figure out... ;)
-Lawrence LeMay