Hello Friends

I am using Redhat Linux 9.0

I forgot my root password.

If anybody to know how to recover or change the root password.

Thank You

Hi, I have not lost my root password, but i do want to change it. Is there any problems or things to be aware of before I attempt this?

Is this the proper or prefered method?
I do not have any x-windows or gui shells installed. I do everything with putty.exe at the moment.
I found the following:

Python 2.2.2 (#1, Dec 10 2002, 09:57:09)
[GCC 3.2.1 20021207 (Red Hat Linux 8.0 3.2.1-2)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>
At the prompt, type the following (replacing password with the password to encrypt and salt with a combination of exactly 2 upper or lower case alphabetic characters, digits, the dot (.) character, or the slash (/) character such as ab or 12:

import crypt; print crypt.crypt("password","salt")

The output is the encrypted password similar to 12CsGd8FRcMSM.

Type [Ctrl]-[D] to exit the Python interpreter.

Cut and paste the exact encrypted password output, without a leading or trailing blank spaces, into the following command:

usermod -p "encrypted-password" username

If you know the root password, just login as root and type passwd

Oh, OK. So i don't need to worry about all these password encryption protocols. I looked through "info" and "manual" last night, but did not see the command "passwd", and figured I had to do it through "usermod".

Thanks....Ben

You can use usermod, but you have to use the encrypted password string instead of plain text. If you ever need to do it that way, I use the following to generate encrypted passwords for a CVS server at work (it takes the plain text password as an argument and outputs the encrypted password). It's from http://www.taursys.com/howto/cvs/ and is a bit simpler than the python code you have in the first post:

#!/usr/bin/perl

srand (time());
my $randletter = "(int (rand (26)) + (int (rand (1) + .5) % 2 ? 65 : 97))";
my $salt = sprintf ("%c%c", eval $randletter, eval $randletter);
my $plaintext = shift;
my $crypttext = crypt ($plaintext, $salt);

print "${crypttext}\n";