On Feb 5, 2008, at 1:46 PM, Mike Miller wrote: > On Tue, 5 Feb 2008, Clay Fandre wrote: > >> s/doesn't have a password/doesn't have a password that you know/ > > I can believe that because (A) it makes sense [as Florin suggested > -- a > random string would be optimal] and (B) several people have said it. > > One respondent suggested that this command will allow the user to > change > the root password: > > $ sudo passwd root > > But usually the first step in running the passwd command is to enter > the > existing password, which you don't know (doesn't it work that way > for root > passwords). Mike, you're wrong here. On every *nix system I've been on, the root user doesn't have to enter the old password in order to change the password for a given user. The command above would work, while it would only ask the user issuing the command for their current password, and the new password (twice) for the given user. Alternatively, you change the second delimited field in /etc/ shadow.passwd to be blank, thus clearing out the password for root. ----- Eric F Crist Secure Computing Networks