- How I recovered a lost root password in FreeBSD
- This was on a CyberGuard LX firewall, running version 4.2 BSD
- Luckily I did know one user name and it had no password.
- cgadmin
- Using the boot CD, pick option 4 for single use mode
- going through the country and keyboard
- going to the repair mode with CDROM/DVD option off the install menu,
- using the "live" CDROM filesystem gave me a root prompt Fixit#
- now mounting the hard drive, in my case /dev/ad0s3a
- mount /dev/ad0s3a /mnt
- now edit the master password file
- vi /mnt/etc/master.passwd
- on the root line, delete all characters between the first two :: to remove
- the root password altogether.
- hence ending up with
- root::0:0::00:Charlie &:/root:/bin/csh or something similar
- save the file
- now change permissions, but look at them first, make a note so you can put
- them back to the correct setting later
- chmod 777 /mnt/etc
- chmod 666 /mnt/etc/master.passwd
- reboot
- remove the CD and reboot the original system.
- For some reason my older FreeBSD version 4.3 filesystem did not like being
- mounted onto a FreeBSD 6.1 install CD
- Hence on reboot it made me do a manual fsck
- Then another reboot
- Now login as a user, cgadmin in my case
- get a prompt and run
- pwd_mkdb /etc/master.passwd
- This rebuilds the secure password database
- Now get another getty - say Alt-F4 and login as root
- Amazing!!!!
- Reboot if you like, set yourself a new root password and write it down this
- time
- I prefer a label on the bottom of the box, because if you have got this
- access, you can crack the password.
- Now don't forget to set the file security back to where it was chmod 755 /etc chmod 600 /etc/master.passwd Hope you enjoyed the day. Derek
FROM: