lost HMC password

[p595pimp]

anybody know how to recover/reset a lost password on an old deskside
HMC?
yes, i tried the default (hscroot / abc123), no, it didnt work.

i noticed grub flashes by as it boots up, so i hit "e" a couple of
times to interrupt the boot, but then it just takes you to a severely
limited bash-like prompt, where you essentially can;t do anything
useful, like issue a passwd command. there is a limited subset of
commands you can issue, one is called "password", so you would think
you could use that to reset the password, but no, it just says "error
32... must be authenticated" or some such nonsense, and doesnt do
anything.
can't even get it to boot to single-user.
i know an HMC is just a stripped down linux box, but how stripped down
is it?
also there doesnt appear to be an ASMI to access.
WTF???

anybody know anything about this one?

thanks,
-P

[AlexB]

I bet the easiest way is to either reinstall HMC from CD/DVD (official way) or
get any linux rescue disk (like Fedora Core 6 for i386 - about 85 mb to
download/burn), then boot off this CD and enter 'linux rescue' at grub prompt.
The CD will load and mount your HMC's root. Then you can edit /etc/passwd and
/etc/shadow to your taste

Alex

[Andre Naumann]

p595pimp wrote:
> anybody know how to recover/reset a lost password on an old deskside
> HMC?
> yes, i tried the default (hscroot / abc123), no, it didnt work.
>
> i noticed grub flashes by as it boots up, so i hit "e" a couple of
> times to interrupt the boot, but then it just takes you to a severely
> limited bash-like prompt, where you essentially can;t do anything
> useful, like issue a passwd command. there is a limited subset of
> commands you can issue, one is called "password", so you would think
> you could use that to reset the password, but no, it just says "error
> 32... must be authenticated" or some such nonsense, and doesnt do
> anything.
> can't even get it to boot to single-user.
> i know an HMC is just a stripped down linux box, but how stripped down
> is it?

What you've got there is only the GRUB prompt. You can do a few things
to GRUB there, but you're still within the bootloader, it hasn't even
begun to boot an operating system, yet.

Up to HMC version 1.6.0 or something(which is the latest I've been
playing around with), the GRUB menu has only one entry called "hmc"
which you can edit by pressing "e" at the right moment(or keep hitting
the shift or any other key that doesn't produce any output until you're
in the GRUB menu and the timer doesn't run out. THEN you can press "e"
to edit the "hmc" entry and add "init=/bin/sh" to the kernel-line.
Then press "b" to boot and wait till you get a shell prompt.

Voila, a rootshell on you HMC. After remounting the root filesystem
read-write with "mount -o remount,rw /", you can do as you like.

On the other hand.. Usually, there's not much critical data on an HMC,
so re-installing would be the easiest way and it's supported, too.

Hacking you way into the box isn't...

Regards,
Andre Naumann