root passwd?

B

Blaqb0x

Registered
Hi,

I just installed Jaguar on my friends powerbook. I created a user account for him by his name and set the password but, I don't remember being asked for a root passwd during installation. When I su I try every passwd I can think of but none work.

Anyone know how I can change the root passwd? Is it possible to boot into MacOS9 and edit the master.passwd file?

thanx,
 
If u'hav created only one account, it's the admin account.
On terminal u hav to type sudo -s to log in root mode.

Anyway if u hav to change root passwd and u don't remember the old one, u can do it by booting with os x install cd. There's an utility to change root passwd.
 
"sudo passwd root " in terminal.
after giving your password you can change root's one.
Click to expand...

Yes, only if u r admin.
And if u r admin and your account is the only one on that machine, your password is the same as root one. So... it's useless this command.

=/
 
This is a way to avoid typing root password, but not to solve the problem.
Anyway in some situation u hav to use terminal as root, so u hav to know root password.

The only way to solve is by doing as written in second post.
 
I mean boot to single user to change root password. In single user mode you are allowed to do that without confirmation, because 'you are root' in the console, no questions asked. passwd.
 
Howdy,

There is a bit if incorrect information in this thread that should be corrected...

First off if you have not "activated" the root account it does not have a password. This is a good thing with no password it cannot be cracked ;)

So how does the admin do root things? Via the sudo command which is set uid root. Huh? what does that mean? It means that when the program is run it runs as the owner of the file and not the user that started it. You can see this from the s in the permissions on sudo below.

eric% ls -l /usr/bin/sudo
---s--x--x 1 root wheel 96384 Sep 14 19:16 /usr/bin/sudo
Click to expand...

When you run sudo it has its own set of checks it runs, one thing it does it verify that you are who you should be. That is when it asks for a password but that is the user's password not root's (who doesn't have one remember.)

A cool feature of sudo is that it is possible to specify specifically what commands a given user can use via sudo. At my old university they used sudo to give all the grad students
the ability to arbitrairly kill print jobs, even those which were not their own.

This was a great solution if someone printed a malformed postscript document (resulting is 300 pages of raw postscript garbage) anyone who noticed it could kill the job. Oh yeah, also sudo actions are logged so you could not abuse this power to shortern the print queue without leaving a paper trail. ;)

Finally, someone mentioned you needed to log on as root to have a root shell. Not so, just use sudo to start a shell using sudo tcsh

Have fun,
-Eric
 
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