[rescue] IBM 6611-170

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Saturday, February 16, 2002 at 13:48:19 (-0500), Steve Sandau wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [rescue] IBM 6611-170
>
> I'm interested in some of this, too. I have a 6611 (intact, with HDD,
> token ring card, built-in ethernet, etc). It boots, runs, etc. The only
> thing I *don't* have is the root p/w. Bummer. I also don't have another
> AIX box to mount the drive on and edit the p/w file. I also can't see
> that any of the Unix boxes I *do* have (Solaris 7, 8, SunOS 4.0.3, Linux
> 2.2, FreeBSD 4.3, HP-UX 10.20, SCO Unix) will mount an AIX drive.

If I'm not mistaken the 6611 OS is closer to *BSD than anything else.

In any case you don't need to actually mount the drive just to edit the
root password entry.  There's a 99.999% chance the password file is a
simple plain old V7 style password file (and of course if it boots and
you can login as any user then you can figure this out).  All you've got
to do is find it on the disk and replace the 13 characters of the
unknown encrypted password value with the 13 chars of a known encrypted
password value, either taken from some other account on the same
machine, or perhaps even taken from some other box entirely.  Finding
the correct disk sector and editing it shouldn't be too hard.  If there
happen to be multiple sectors all containing what look like passwd file
contents well then just edit them all.  If you can login as any other
user on the box then there's some chance you might even be able to find
the exact sector number through other hints in the directory and inode
tables (at least those parts you can access as an unprivileged user).

So, all you really need to gain full access to the system is another
system with suitable hardware interfaces, the rights to read and write
such a device on the machine you connect it to, and of course some sort
of searching and editing tools.  You can always first make an image copy
of the drive if you're afraid of screwing it up.

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;  <gwoods at acm.org>;  <g.a.woods at ieee.org>;  <woods at robohack.ca>
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