[nycbug-talk] lost root!

[Tom Rue]

Good morning.

I've been running a web server on FreeBSD 6.1 for about a year and a hal;
not professionally, pretty much self-taught, partly by trial and error. Now
for an error.

A week or two ago, in the course of creating another user account, I
evidently changed my root pw (which I discovered yesterday morning), to
something which is unknown to me. Not a good thing. Aside from spending the
day on Mother's Day celebrations, I spent yesterday evening attempting to
reset it by directions in these links, without success. Somehow, which I
don't quite understand, I did manage to get Apache and MySql started,
despite still not being able to log in as root. (I did make sure to change
the permissions on /etc and /etc/master.passwd back to 755 and 600, though I
realize I may have to open them up again to make the change.) The problem
I've been having has been getting FreeBSD to behave as the texts linked
below suggest that it should when booting into Single User mode. In fact, it
doesn't appear to be booting into Single User mode, which may be the
problem. Is there a way to confirm this, or around it?

Any other suggestions on how I can get back in as root?

These are the two most relevant pages that I found. If anyone could help me
figure out what I'm missing or doing wrong, I'd appreciate it.

http://groups.google.com/group/mailing.freebsd.hackers/browse_frm/thread/7bd61cd70f1f23d6/061b7b1ccbd8cf56?lnk=st&q=%22freebsd+6.1%22+forgot+root+password&rnum=9#061b7b1ccbd8cf56


http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/howto-freebsd-reset-recover-root-password.html


Many thanks.

Tom Rue
Monticello, NY


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