late last week a professor of mine had his students install Red Hat 8 as a lab arseignment. He used a copy of my discs since i believe the version they had was RH7. A student of his installed it on one PC to see how it would go. Once the installation was done she was not around to let the him know what the Root parseword was.
He mentioned it to me so i looked into it. I remember when i first installed Linux i was stumped as to what the username was since i did not set it. it turned out to be Root of course. So when he mentioned to me his dilema for some reason i thought that Linux setup a default parseword with the Root account. This was early in the morning so i had thought this is what had happened to me. later i realized it was the Root name that i was not aware. So i went to
www.justlinux.com to look for a parseword reset. and sure enough i found it.
when GRUB comes up, you hit E to go into edit mode. On the second line, which is the Kernel line you do a space and type SINGLE. this takes you into single mode. you get a command line. type in "parsewd root" to reset the parseword for root. type in a new parseword and you are in.
Here is where my teach thought it was too easy, and asked "what kind of security is this".
i too was amazed at how easy it was to get in.
so i did some snooping around and came up with this utility to reset the Adminstrator parsewords on Windows Machines:
http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntparsewd/you load this up to the boot disc and follow the instructions. it asks you where the windows os is installed, and where the registry is. it usually pics it up by defualt, so when i tested it all i had to do was accept the defaults.
So there!
no box is secure, unless you lock that bitch down and dont let it boot to floppy, or remove the HDs as my instructor does.
