Root Password expired. Need help recovering. System Locked Down
Ok here is the situation. I am not a formal Solaris admin by any means but I need to get this machine's root password working. This is a production machine and I will be taking downtime tomorrow to fix it.
Here are the specs/issues:
-Sun v880
-Solaris 8
-root password expired
-STOP-A has been disabled in the OS.
-System set to autoboot
-Can't perform an init because no other account has root privledges. I have accounts that can login to the machine.
-Using putty to access the RSC port.
-Have access to a sun USB keyboard. Tried to use STOP-A to get an OK prompt without success during the boot process.
Basically I know for a fact that I can set a new root password IF I can get an OK prompt to tell the machine to boot into single user mode. I have done that previously in this type of situation. I just can't figure out how to end up at an OK prompt.
We have the disk drives on RAID5 using veritas volume manager so I have considered pulling one of the disks because that should cause the machine to report a disk error and let me go into system maintenance mode and I can issue an init 0.
I do not want to pull a disk on a production machine if there is another way.
So how can I get to an OK prompt?
[1303 byte] By [
JimL] at [2007-11-25 23:39:50]
# 1
I'll give it a shot, was the machine originally booted with the USB keyboard attached and when you plug it in does it react to the keyboard at all ?
Depending on the model you can hit the power button once and that will bring it down gracefully at which time you may be able to get a stop a as soon as the screen comes on. From there you will need cd disc2 to boot from, mount the root file system and zero out the passwd, reboot and then login as root with no passwd. I've never had anyone disable stop a so there might be some other issues here that I am missing. I've only had to do this maybe a dozen times in as many years and don't have my cheatsheet handy right now...
# 2
We have access to the rsc port so we can shutdown the machine gracefully. When we boot up the machine, the keyboard does not seem to do much however if you hold down a bunch of keys I get a USB error.
I believe the server sees the keyboard. I don't ultimately need to boot off a cd since the password is simply expired and I know what it is. Solaris will allow me to login to root in single user mode with an expired password. I just need an OK prompt so I can type in boot -s
I just can't get Stop-A to work because it is disabled in the OS and it doesn't seem to work with the USB keyboard during boot.
It also doesn't work when sending a <Break> command using putty on the RSC port during boot.
JimL at 2007-7-5 18:47:46 >
