[Gllug] I have forgotten my root password, I am a muppet.

[Jake Jellinek]

> All true. However, one thing cracking tools will *not* do is crack a
> root password set by even a semi competent sysadmin on an important
> machine. This will be non dictionary based and a mix of numbers, upper
> and lower case.
>

Still pretty crackable, given a few hours and a fast machine. Best bet is to
include a few control codes and wierd symbols, which is especially fun
because only certain clients/OS'es will always acurately reproduce them.
This is still brute forceable of course, but it gives you a few extra hours
to change your password when you notice that someone some how nicked your
shadow file (That could NEVER happen!!) ;-)

My vote goes with the init=/bin/bash option with the mount -o remount, rw /
and then vi /etc/passwd and either remove the crypt (if your distribution &
version allows that) or copy in a new crypt from another machine or existing
username on the current machine.

This all reminds me of some of the fun ways you can seriously confuse fellow
colleagues by sneakily doing odd things to their shell, environment or even
system binaries whilst they aren't looking, but I'd never do that. My
favourite "time bomb" game, which is a doddle for experienced admins to
beat, is finding ways of auto shutting down someones machine following a
known time-out value. Basically, create a script to run a hidden copy of
shutdown (or send direct init signals), run it and hide it from the process
list in some way etc. and then inform your colleage he has 10 minutes to
find out what you've just done before his/her machine shuts down. Is this a
sad pass time?

Jake.


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