[mdlug] [WLUG] SuSE root breakin help needed

[Jeff Hanson]

On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 4:11 PM, Jay Nugent <jjn at nuge.com> wrote:
>   Thanks Joe!  I was *so* relieved to see that LVM was not used.  And
> this got me onto the hard drive where I was then able to vi the
> /etc/passwd file and blank out the root password field.
...
>   Anyone know a way to generate the one-way password encryption?  Then I
> can vi /etc/password and edit in the 13 character string???  Seems to me
> there used to be a 'crypt' command or something similar...

Suse actually uses passwd to store the password hash?  I though most
distros used shadow so that it's permissions could be set to readable
only by root so that normal users couldn't get the hashes and
brute-force them offline.