Various questions

[Rick Stevens]

On Thu, 2007-01-04 at 18:05 +0000, Anne Harriss wrote:
> Please could you tell me how I find what is my "Admin address" to log into 
> these pages?
> 
> More seriously, I have a problem.  My son installed linux Fedora, and wrote 
> down the root password down for me...except that he made a mistake in 
> writing it down, and so I can't download updates, etc.  OK, so I need to 
> change the password, and he told me how to do that.  Except that when I 
> write the new one, the respons in the Grub command is that it needs 
> authenticating.  Well, I don't understand what THAT means.  What do I do?

If grub requires a password and you don't have that, you must boot off
of either the rescue CD or the first installation CD in "rescue" mode:

	boot: linux rescue

Tell the system to mount the existing system.  Then enter this command
at the "#" prompt:

	chroot /mnt/sysimage

You'll get another "#" prompt and you can then edit
the /etc/boot/grub/grub.conf file and either remove the "password" line
or change the password.

If grub does NOT require a password (or does and you know what it is),
then do NOT use the CDs.  Just reboot the system and when the grub menu
comes up, hit the "E" key.  Use the arrows to highlight the kernel that
you normally boot (it'll probably already be highlighted) and hit "E"
again.  Use the arrows to highlight the line that starts with "kernel"
and hit "E" once again.  Go to the end of the line and append the word
"single" to it and press "ENTER".  Then press "B" and the system will
boot into single user mode.  When the boot process finishes, you'll be
at the "#" prompt.

At that point, you can change the root user password by issuing this
command:

	passwd

then put in the password you want for the root user.

When you're all done, if you booted off CD, pop the CD out and enter
"exit;exit".  The first "exit" takes you out of the chroot environment,
the second one will reboot the system.  If you DIDN'T boot with a CD,
just enter "exit" once and the system should boot to it's normal mode,
but now with a new root user password.

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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-           "I understand Windows 2000 has a Y2K problem."           -
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