Trying to update root password

Hi guys. I'm a new employee and I'm trying to recover a redhat linux box (v8.0) from the last programmer that was here. He didn't let anybody know what the root password was, however. I looked on the redhat site and was told the following for this version of linux

o Boot into the system in single user mode (as specified by http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/...nux-single.html)

o run "passwd root" to change the password

The only problem is, when I perform the second bullet point above, I receive the following error message:

Changing password for user root.
passwd: Module is unknown

Any ideas on what's going on would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

you could login to another machine which you have an accout on (for which you know the password), and copy your entries from the /etc/password and /etc/shadow files into the equiv on the new box - just for the root user... you get the idea...

If you don't have an account on another box, then ask one of the users if you can copy their password for the root user, then you can both change them...

Or last resort, if you are the only user and there are no other funcional accts on the box or any other box that you can log into, then post back and one of us can give you a couple of lines for your password and shadow files.

I think that'll do it - but someone yell if I'm barking up the wrong dog

edit: It's a bit of a cheap hax0r way of doing things.. 'd be nice to know what the actual error is !


christo

Sounds like a PAM error to me. PAM (short for Pluggable Authentication Modules) is used for authenticating people in a number of different ways, from logging in locally to NIS. Overwriting /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow with an existing pair sounds like just about the only way to fix it unless you can get that authentication module installed somehow.

just an option (maybe not the best/easiest way ):

Use a linux version that fits on a floppy/cd-rom with the necessary binaries to do the task. Of couse you could also edit /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow manually

If it is a pam error (as suggested above), you can edit the pam config files to make sure things are pointing to the correct location, i believe they are in /etc/pam.d/, and the one you may want to work with is 'login' (this is all from memory, i could be way off on files/locations)

I'd just compare what the values are with a machine that you know to have working pam.

In addition to what I just said, /etc/pam.d/passwd is probably another one you want to check (infact it is likely the one you want to 'fix' to get the 'passwd' command to work)