RS/6000 (AIX) password reset - Linux?

[Ian Finder]

I picked up a Tadpole / IBM N40 recently and this is the exact same methodology I used- if anyone knows of a better way do deal with JFS disks, I'm all ears.

> On May 5, 2015, at 08:11, Jules Richardson <jules.richardson99 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> 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
>