Forgotten Password of root in Fedora 8, Cant login, need it badly :(
 

Hi guys,

It will be finals week on next week and I have to solve this problem before final examination. This problem occur when one of my students modified the root user on our Computer laboraty, I already tried accessing the GRUB by pressing "e" and typing single then boot, but the single command isn't recognized.

Help us guys, if I can solved this problem then I have to reinstall the majority of the systems in our laboratory, by the way using the recovery disc is not considered as option because there's no cd-rom installed on every systems.

Thanks in advance.

Magically yours,

confulity :confused:

Enter the capital letter "S" instead for single user mode. You may need to know the root password to log in however. Do you have the root password replicated to all of the computers in the lab? Do the other systems in the lab use public key authentication for ssh access? Do they allow root access? Did the student change the root password on all of the computers? ( Why doesn't the student give you the new root password? )

On some systems, root can't login if the password is null. If that is the case, you can cut and paste the your regular user's password hash and then reboot and use that.

Presumably it was malicious.

I assume you know this process http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ssword-668118/,

but can you boot off a USB key on systems without CD drives?

If that is the case, a failing grade and the threat of expulsion might improve his memory. Maybe the student who did it is unknown or it was accidental. If /etc/passwd is replicated from one server to all of the machines, that could be the case.

I had once booted into windows, a rare occurrence. Someone had "borrowed" my essid for some reason (I use wpa so I hope it didn't do them any good) and I was connected to the wrong wireless router. I was surprised to find that the connection was unencrypted and quickly went about encrypting it, locking out the owner of the router! I discovered my mistake soon after and changed the key on my own router.

Mistakes happen.