Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.csd.uwm.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!indri!aplcen!haven!umd5!feldman From: feldman@umd5.umd.edu (Mark Feldman) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: changing su password in netinfo Message-ID: <5281@umd5.umd.edu> Date: 29 Aug 89 14:41:43 GMT References: Reply-To: feldman@umd5.umd.edu (Mark Feldman) Organization: University of Maryland, College Park Lines: 25 In article mdixon@thelonius.PARC.xerox.com (Mike Dixon) writes: >somehow we've lost the su password to one of our machines. if it were >a vanilla unix box... Well, there are several solutions, some of which have already been mentioned. A quick & dirty fix is to boot single user and add an niload or niutil to set the root password at the bottom of the rc.local file. Something like: niutil -createprop . /users/root passwd '' will work quite well to remove the root password. If any of the users on the NeXT are in the wheel group, none of this is necessary because NeXT allows members of the wheel group to su root with their own passwords. Once root, the root password can be changed without knowledge of the previous root password. The local NetInfo database information is kept in the file /etc/netinfo/local.nidb/collection. Unfortunately, there are no shell-based utilities for directly managing this file, which makes doing anything with it yucky. Mark