recovering root password in Suse9

From: Timur (blackdir_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 01/31/04 

Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2004 10:03:05 GMT

A friend of mine forgot his root password on a SUSE 9 installation (but he
still remember the one of his personal account) and prior for him to
reinstall the system I offered my help to recover it, since it could be a
way to learn more about default authentication mechanism in Linux (and SUSE
9).

I booted his PC with a Live CD (I used Knoppix since I had it with me) and
after mounting his etx3 partition (rw) I modified the shadow file by
putting * instead of the encoded root password. I rebooted but still I was
not able to become superuser (su - was still asking a password and NULL was
not working).

I thought that the reason was related to some PAM configuration not allowing
a blank password, and I added in the /etc/pam.d/shadow file the paramiter
nullok. I rebooted but this also didn't work.

Is anyone able to describe me the std auth mechanism in SUSE 9 sothat I can
modify it in order to re-log as root, change his password and but
shadow/pam back to the original state?

thanks a lot & regards,
Timur

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