5 Feb
2018
5 Feb
'18
5:56 p.m.
On Feb 3, 2018, at 9:08 AM, Jules Richardson via cctech <cctech at classiccmp.org>
wrote:
On 02/01/2018 02:28 PM, Tapley, Mark via cctech
wrote:
All,
One last update, just in case you are curious.
Although ftpd is disabled on the RS/6000 so at least the weakness Doug pointed out would
not have let me in, his post convinced me our help desk would frown at putting it on our
network. (And, although the suggestions to put the disk on a modern machine to read are
good, I?m a bit scared of the idea of disassembling a functioning system - I?m not that
great a technician?. anyway the install CD and IBM technote referenced earlier were enough
to get me root access.)
Rather than working through smit/smitty to change the IP address and putting the machine
onto our network, I instead used a straight-through ethernet cable to connect it directly
(no hub) to my 1 GHz Aluminum Powerbook G4. (The ethernet port on the laptop is
auto-sensing, else I?d have needed a crossover cable.) I set the IP address manually on
the G4 ethernet to be only a few bits away from the RS/6000?s existing IP address (per
?ifconfig" and set the netmask to be the same. Mac OS X.4 on the G4 does have ftpd
running, so I was able to ftp from the RS/6000 to the G4 and push .tar archives across. I
remembered to command ?binary? in FTP before starting the transfer.
Once on the G4, ?tar -xvf <filename>? extracted the archives, apparently
successfully (although I have not tested any of the binaries, they are of secondary
importance). Of note, double-clicking on the .tar did *not* succeed in expanding it.
I reconfigured the G4 back to its normal ethernet setting and put it back on the network,
then used TenFourFox (thanks again, Cameron!) to push the .tar files up to our institute
large-file http transfer service, then sent links to the Goddard and other folks who
needed them.
I?m still hanging fire on confirmation that the files made it there OK, but I?m
?><? this close to declaring total success on this operation.
Next step, hopefully, re-vitalizing the RAD-6000s we have had in cold storage (in orbit)
for 12 years!
https://image.gsfc.nasa.gov
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/nasa-s-newly-rediscovered-image-m…
Again, many many thanks for the suggestions and help!
- Mark
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