I just got a server from an oil company that was throwing them out. I was happy to take a few and they were glad to get their hands off of the (you know oil companies with their millions to throw away at new servers) Anyways the server i have is running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4? AS and i need to reset the root password so that i can work on it. As of now i have only ben able to get to the sh-2.05b shell prompt and when i type in passwd to reset i get the error -authentication token manipulation error- now this server is missing a powerbank that is supposed to be attatched with like 16 drives, but as to what i know it works without it. Am i missing a file or is there some security that the oil company put on here that i don't know about. Your help is appreciated

take a look in /etc/shadow there should be a line that looks similar to this:
delete all the stuff in bold, that should blank the pass.

hm i tried to access the file but it says Permission denied

you need to find a way to either boot with a livecd or remove the drive and put it in another computer, either do what i said earlier or chroot to the drive and passwd. what kernel version is it? uname -r

when linux is about to boot hit tab you will get a command prompt. Once your at the prompt you type linux single, passwd (your new password) and then your done.

Its been a while since I have done it like that, maybe they changed it.

edit: I just checked on the wonderful internet they still do this.

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/l...ng-single.html

yeah that could work if its a poorly set up system...

Doubt its a poorly set up system....this is a system from an oil company that they bought when it was top of the line

did you try it out? It can be the most expensive serveron the face of the earth, but it could have been overlooked or not known about by the person that installed the software.

Do you need to keep redhat or can you just overwrite it with something else?

yeah, installing a new distro on it would be great IMHO... i mean, how do you know there are no backdoors in the current install?? using other people's installs gives me the creeps...

Well i want to try and keep the orginal install due to scsi drivers and things and there's about 4 different installs??? I have no idea. I haven't had the time to try all the suggestions yet, but will when i get the time I will and post back. Thanx for the help so far

ok so i got knoppix to work on the server and I again tried acessing the /etc/shadow file to no prevail. The thing is locked and/or encrypted to some extent that even knoppoix won't open it. I really think these oil companies thought their servers trough before putting them online.

well what type of errors are you encourntering, can you even mount the drive? read any of the data? are you sure you tried knoppix thru root? can you chroot to the drive and passwd?

why dont you just format? stop wasting your time, find the drivers for your controller and your fine. unless your after daa on thier servers (which they might have deleted) it might be hard but definatly not impossible. you can format in 30 mins tops on a high end server, even picking through the driver lists, and if its a high end expensive server the drivers are there 99% of the time.

Ok well i finnaly was able to chroot the drive and change the password, but all in all its become useless because it was part of a cluster. At this point in time i'm thinking of doing a fresh install. I'm not after any of the data, cause its all geological, any good linux versions that implement 4Xp3 700mhz xenon procs and scsi drives?