Password-ly Relief!
Here I sit typing, with a weight recently lifted from my shoulders, from (dun dun dunnnnn!) Linux! Wuhhoo!!
OK, so first, here is what I did to fix the password problems (that stemmed from my brain-dead-ness problems... but that's for my personal blog instead of here!)
At the LILO boot prompt, instead of pressing the Enter key like usual, I typed this:
mount root=/dev/hdb3 init=/bin/bash
What this appears to do is mount the specified partition as root. I, conveniently, chose the partition I use as root to be the root partition. Nice, eh? (If I understand correctly, I think people can get all fancy and have other partitions that are bootable and this allows the user to boot into any bootable partition.)
The next bit is the "init" part. This took me right into the bash shell as root user WITHOUT a password. Yay! This was the first part of the mission accomplished. Going into the bash shell seemed to work for me... I think I happen to use bash as my default shell, so if you use something else perhaps you need to indicate what shell? And maybe it doesn't matter. I really don't know.
So, to change passwords I used the nifty, my-new-best-friend, command passwd. By typing in either passwd root or simply passwd (because we're already logged in as root) we can set a new password without ever needing to remember the old one. (Which I did actually remember, by the way... after resetting the password. *sigh*)
To be thorough in the process, I decided to reset the user passwords too... which meant I had to remind myself of what usernames I had set up. Turns out I only had one, and I found that by doing a simple ls /home to see all the user directories. From here I used the passwd
Sounds fairly painless, doesn't it?
I was relieved (and yet also somewhat startled) to learn that there are a number of ways to work around this (very noob-ish) problem. Here are a couple of links that helped me get to my solution. There are tons out there, and I had to try a few things before getting this to work, but it worked. :) Hurrah!
"Ack! I forgot my root password!" @ everything2.com
some conversational tidbits @ quotesdb.info
OK, so first, here is what I did to fix the password problems (that stemmed from my brain-dead-ness problems... but that's for my personal blog instead of here!)
At the LILO boot prompt, instead of pressing the Enter key like usual, I typed this:
What this appears to do is mount the specified partition as root. I, conveniently, chose the partition I use as root to be the root partition. Nice, eh? (If I understand correctly, I think people can get all fancy and have other partitions that are bootable and this allows the user to boot into any bootable partition.)
The next bit is the "init" part. This took me right into the bash shell as root user WITHOUT a password. Yay! This was the first part of the mission accomplished. Going into the bash shell seemed to work for me... I think I happen to use bash as my default shell, so if you use something else perhaps you need to indicate what shell? And maybe it doesn't matter. I really don't know.
So, to change passwords I used the nifty, my-new-best-friend, command passwd. By typing in either passwd root or simply passwd (because we're already logged in as root) we can set a new password without ever needing to remember the old one. (Which I did actually remember, by the way... after resetting the password. *sigh*)
To be thorough in the process, I decided to reset the user passwords too... which meant I had to remind myself of what usernames I had set up. Turns out I only had one, and I found that by doing a simple ls /home to see all the user directories. From here I used the passwd
Sounds fairly painless, doesn't it?
I was relieved (and yet also somewhat startled) to learn that there are a number of ways to work around this (very noob-ish) problem. Here are a couple of links that helped me get to my solution. There are tons out there, and I had to try a few things before getting this to work, but it worked. :) Hurrah!
"Ack! I forgot my root password!" @ everything2.com
some conversational tidbits @ quotesdb.info
Labels: big mistakes, linux, password, Slackware
posted by olivepeople at 9:35 AM
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