Is there a way to recover root passwords?

[Fault]

yea silly question.


I changed my root password then placed the new password in a protected file with all my other passwords and logged off for the night. however to my dismay gedit never saved the file even after saying it saved.

It saved the wording that identified the password as root password but didn;t save th epassword it's self.


The only other alternitive I see is to reinstall ( Yet Again ) Fedora Core 5.


SO please offer another suggestion.

[Spoon!]

Why do you need to "recover" it? (That's really hard.) Why not just change it?

Boot into single-user mode:
* when GRUB comes on, press a key to enter GRUB, and press "a"
* add " single" to the kernel arguments to boot into single-user mode
* use "passwd" to change password

[ilja]

What Spoon suggests, but instead of doing passwd, you can view the file /etc/shadow take the first line , it contains the root password. It is between the $ and : . Now you can bruteforce it. There a lot of apps our there, to make it.
It takes a while though

[ccrvic]

Originally Posted by ilja

What Spoon suggests, but instead of doing passwd, you can view the file /etc/shadow take the first line , it contains the root password. It is between the $ and : . Now you can bruteforce it. There a lot of apps our there, to make it.
It takes a while though

It takes an unfeasibly long time, unless you've got dictionary passwords.

One of the servers I run is a Dell PowerEdge 1850. This has twin 2.8GHz Xeons in it, and 2GB of RAM. And it's idle more often than not. So plenty of grunt for jobs like this.

I regularly run john against the shadow file (to make sure users aren't putting rubbish passwords in). The ones I've cracked so far get cracked within about 10 seconds; the rest (i.e. the ones I've generated) have sustained this attack for 3 weeks solid.

Brute-forcing a password on a modern machine is a pointless exercise unless you're trying to get in surreptitiously - in which case, how you do it is your problem, 'cos I'm not going to help you.

Vic.

[dfister29]

I would follow Spoon's method. It's fast, it's easy, and it works.

The only other alternitive I see is to reinstall ( Yet Again ) Fedora Core 5.

You will find that as you progress with Linux (Fedora, Ubuntu, Suse, etc.) or any *nix, there are very few times you should ever need to reinstall a system from scratch. All of your configuration files are plain text documents which can be altered from a bootable linux environment like the FC5 recovery CD. It's even possible to delete or completely mangle your kernel and you can still re-install or fix just the kernel without reinstalling your entire system. I'm not saying it's always easy, but there are alot more tools available to recover a linux system without restoring from backup or reloading from scratch.

[ilja]

You can use Spoon's method, but you will not recover, but delete the password. You'll be able to use the system, but the password is lost forever.

[Fault]

o cool I didn;t know that. ill give it a try

and Ilja.

NO possible way to brute my box unless I have a few months of time.


My password is horrendously long and uses every known usable character NUMEROUS times.

[jvroig]

NO possible way to brute my box unless I have a few months of time.

My password is horrendously long and uses every known usable character NUMEROUS times.

If I may say so, that is so cool. I'll do that for the superuser in my ERP. Thanks.

[Fault]

All it takes is one brute force to make you secure everything.


Last year I dared someone to exploit my phpBB forums and they couldnbt do it so instead the brute forced my root login, since then I use as secure as passwords as I casn think of


and thats the help you guys gave worked. al though the first boot try i did aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaa like a dummy LOL

[dfister29]

I'm happy to hear things are working for you again!