RS/6000 (AIX) password reset - Linux?

[Jules Richardson]

On 05/01/2015 06:47 PM, Jules Richardson wrote:
> I don't have install media, and I don't know the root password

Follow-up to this; I ended up hooking the AIX drive up to my SGI O2200, 
then writing some quick C code to scan raw disk blocks for potential 
password entries, which left me with ~370 possible blocks.

Those I then transferred over to a Linux machine (I don't have any PC SCSI 
controllers on this side of the Atlantic with which to hook the drive up 
directly) and filtered out a lot of false-positives, leaving me with just 
five blocks.

At the suggestion of another listmember, I ran a password cracker* on the 
remaining data, rather than clearing the passwords and writing raw data 
back to the disk (I don't believe that JFS includes anything which would 
have detected the change and become upset, but it did make more sense to 
just try a cracker first).

* it's a little more involved than that, because of course IBM does things 
differently and the shadow file isn't in the normal format, so needs 
converting first.

Anyway, all good now (except I may still want to do a clean OS install, 
depending on what data's on the machine)

cheers

Jules