Re: Root account desactivated

[Dan Trainor <dant () cavecreek net>]

Martin -

Can you bring the machine down?  I would suggest passing init=/bin/sh to
the system at LILO boot (granted you are using LILO - I don't use GRUB,
but if you do, I'm sure there's a similar switch), mount partitions
accordingly, and use your editor of choice (be very careful, I think
that goes without saying), and edit the line accordingly.

On some of my personal machines at home, I've been fortunate/dumb enough
to leave another console logged in as root, and I could fix a problem
like this by switching to one of those logged in consoles and did what I
had to do, that way.  Perhaps you have physical access to this machine
and can do the same thing?

Hope that helps
-dant




On Thu, 2004-03-11 at 15:50, sil wrote:
> If you have sudo on the machine you can try doing something like
>
> sudo sed 's/\/sbin/\/nologin/\/bin\/bash/g' /etc/passwd >> /tmp/passwd|\
> mv /tmp/passwd /etc/passwd
>
>
>
> -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
> "The most tyrannical of governments are those which make
> crimes of  opinions, for everyone has an inalienable
> right to his thoughts." -- Benedict Spinoza
>
>
> //sil
>
> http://www.kungfunix.net   http://www.politrix.org
> http://www.infiltrated.net http://bush.shafted.us
>
> On Thu, 11 Mar 2004, MARTIN M. Bnoni wrote:
>
> > Hi community!
> >
> > I have a really stupid trouble: on a Redhat 9.0, the line matching the root
> > account in the file /etc/passwd has been changed from ".../bin/bash" to
> > ".../sbin/nologin". We have the root password, but when performing a "su"
> > command, the system replies that the account is not currently available.
> >
> > So the question is: how from an user's account and knowing the root's
> > password but having the root account disabled can we reactivate this root's
> > account?
> >
> > Any suggestion would be appreciated, I do not want to reinstall the box :(
> >
> > Thanks a lot in advance!
> >
> > _________________________________________________________________
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> >
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> to facilitate one-on-one interaction with one of our expert instructors. 
> Attend a course taught by an expert instructor with years of in-the-field 
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Ethical Hacking at the InfoSec Institute. Mention this ad and get $545 off 
any course! All of our class sizes are guaranteed to be 10 students or less 
to facilitate one-on-one interaction with one of our expert instructors. 
Attend a course taught by an expert instructor with years of in-the-field 
pen testing experience in our state of the art hacking lab. Master the skills 
of an Ethical Hacker to better assess the security of your organization. 
Visit us at: 
http://www.infosecinstitute.com/courses/ethical_hacking_training.html
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