On 11/22/24 11:56, The David wrote:
> We have been using the debian 3.2.0-4-686-pae for our company. We are moving
> to another state and we forgot the password. Is there anyway to recover this
> without losing data? Thank you.
Boot off rescue media, mount the victim's / partition somewhere, then edit
<mount_point>/etc/shadow to change the second field (deliminated by colons)
to the null string. An asterisk means "this user cannot log in", so not
that. Then sync, unmount, and reboot. The first two steps may be implied
in the third, but it won't hurt if they're done explicitly.
So no, you can't recover it easily (the encryption is one way), but you can
reset it.
--
How often have I said to you that when you
have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains,
however improbable, must be the truth?
-- Arthur C. Doyle as Sherlock Holmes in "The Sign of the Four"
