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Forgotten FreeBSD login password

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by nevernessit

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I have recently taken on a job at a local church as their IT Consultant.
I went to logon to their FreeBSD web server today to make some changes to the website only to be told that they had forgot the password for this machine.
I tried a few options using "root" as the user name and a number of passwords they thought it may be. None however worked.
Is there anyway to reset the login password or bypass it so I can create another user? Also am I correct in saying that the "administrator" account on a FreeBSD machine is "root" the same as a Linux (RedHat, Mandrake) machine? as I have not used a FreeBSD machine before.

Thanks for your help in advance.

4 replies

by jaqui

1) look in /etc/passwords if the previous admin didn't mask the passwords then you can get the password from there ( not likely but possible )
(only requires non priveldged user to view )

2) root can be named whatever you want, you can login as root even on RH or MDK and change user name, so it may not be the system admin name.
this is actually a good thing, as this makes it harder for hacking into the system.

by nevernessit

How can I get access as a non privalaged user? I beleive that only two accounts were setup by the previous administrator, the root and his own personal account, which has been removed. So only the root (or administrator - not sure of FreeBSD terminology) account exsists.

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