Need Linux Password!

[LazyD]

Hello,

First post here, don't know jack about Linux, wondering if any of you fine people can help.

I work as tech support (windows, not linux) but something has come up where we have a Equiinet CachePilot which caches a website for use on our network. None of the people here in IT know how it works as we deal with windows and the problem is that we have moved building now (and subnet, ip range, etc) and the site that it hosts is no longer available. The theory is that it has some static ip settings set in its operating system and we are trying to get in there to change them. After some checks which look similar to other linux systems I've seen during boot, it asks for a un and pwd. We don't know what that is because it used to be supported by a company who came in to service it if there were any issues but they have since gone bust.

I have taken the hard drive out of the caching pilot and plugged it into a windows system, windows say the partitions but couldnt assign a letter so I'm guessing something with the file system is preventing that. Plugged it into a pc that was booted to an Ubuntu live cd and could see the partitions and contents etc, there are 4 partitions, one of them has the passwd and passwd-dist files on them which we had a look at and saw that there seem to be lines that may have usernames and encrypted passwords next to them. As I say, this may be the case since I know very little about linux.

Can we do something with these passwd and passwd-dist files to get the real password for the admin or administrator accounts so we can log in and sort this out.

Any help or ideas much appreciated.

[GNU-Fan]

Usally, the password is hashed. This means, it can't extracted back to cleartext.

The idea with the live CD was a good one. What you can do now is to chroot in the other file system and change the password, as root (administration accoun) with the passwd command.

Chrooting means you select the mounted filesystem as it it was the actual root filesystem. (In windows speak, it is similar to mapping another drive as the drive C: on fly). Type "man chroot" and "man passwd" to learn more about it.

[matonb]

GNU-Fan beat me to it!

[LazyD]

Thanks for your replies.

I'm guessing that root refers to more in Linux than it does in windows, ie is it the system partition?

I had a go a chroot but couldn't get it to work. I'm doing that from the terminal prompt which I hope is correct. When I plug the usb adapter with the hd on it into the pc I get 4 disk icons appearing on the desktop name "disk", "disk-1", "disk-2" and "disk-3". In this case the disk with the passwd file on it is on disk-2 so I tried "chroot disk-2" but I get the following error:

"chroot: cannot change root directory to disk-2: no such file or directory"

When I look in Places and then Computer and check the properties of the disks, in volume there is no label, should I be trying to chroot to a volume label? What if there is none? What should I try now?

[matonb]

Hi LazyD,

Yes root it more than the file system it's like a windows administrator account on steroids

You need to open a terminal (like a command window) and find out if / how the OS has attached the devices

#mount

Will give you a list of attached devices, hopefully you'll see your discs here.

You then as GNU_Fan said chroot to the disc in question using the full path i.e. /mnt/Disk-1

You are saying though that ubuntu has detected 4 discs/paritions though so it might be a bit more complicated than that (not much though).

[GNU-Fan]

Thanks for your replies.

I'm guessing that root refers to more in Linux than it does in windows, ie is it the system partition?

Correct. On the one hand, root is synonymous with "Administrator" account. On the other hand, it is the file system where the "top node" -- embodied by "/" -- resides on.

I had a go a chroot but couldn't get it to work. I'm doing that from the terminal prompt which I hope is correct. When I plug the usb adapter with the hd on it into the pc I get 4 disk icons appearing on the desktop name "disk", "disk-1", "disk-2" and "disk-3". In this case the disk with the passwd file on it is on disk-2 so I tried "chroot disk-2" but I get the following error:

"chroot: cannot change root directory to disk-2: no such file or directory"

When I look in Places and then Computer and check the properties of the disks, in volume there is no label, should I be trying to chroot to a volume label? What if there is none? What should I try now?

These are only the partitions. In stark contrast to Windows, where partitions are identified by different letters, partitions (or more specific, the filesystems on them) get "mounted" in the directory tree (which has its root at /) .

Where, and if, they get mounted depends on some factors. You can try to type the
"mount" command without arguments to get a list of all currently mounted drives.
I assume it is somewhat like "/mnt/USBDrive".

Post the output of the mount command if you need further help.

EDIT: Damn, matonb beat me to it.

[LazyD]

when I type "#mount" at the terminal prompt, nothing happens.

Uhh... ?

[LazyD]

Ok, just type "mount" and got some info, where disk-2 was it said "/dev/sdb5 on media/disk-2" or something similar.

I tried "chroot /dev/sdb5" and "chroot /media/disk-2" both didn't work, probably doing something stupid.

I MUST go and get some food now as I am absolutely starving. Be back in roughly 1 hr.

[GNU-Fan]

Please be always verbose on any output you get.

Make sure you run this chroot command as root, too.

[jayd512]

Welcome to LinuxForums!

While booting with the LiveCD, execute, in a terminal,

fdisk -l

Post output here.