RE: Deb on Sparc Station 5
Ok, so you say that it asks for a password after doing stop-A. That's
probably typical of University machines because it makes it harder for
students/staff bypassing privileges.
As someone else said the easiest is probably to zap the OBP settings by
playing with the contents of the device outside of the machine.
Failing that you need to get logged in a root on the existing OS (Solaris I
presume) and then you can reset the password/security settings using the
eeprom command.
>
> On Saturday 13 Aug 2005 21:05, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
> > John Bowden wrote:
> > Got 1 to play with at
> > > the moment but it won't finish booting. Stops while it
> looks for an
> > > ip from dns server. From what I have been told they used
> to belong
> > > to Wolverhampton university.
I suspect that instead of looking for ip/dns it is actually looking for a
NIS (Yellow Pages) server. That is what normally causes Solaris/SunOS to
hang during boot. The machine probably has a static IP address and may be
looking for a specific NIS server. You can get past that point by setting
your own NIS server up for the right domain (it will be shown on the
console) and setup an interface on the NIS server to serve the correct
subnet for the machine.
That should get you to the login prompt. All you need to do now is break in
a root. I suspect that you will not know the root password for the box so
again it gets complicated. NIS might be your friend. The machine will likely
be setup to use NIS for passwords if so then you can create an account in
the NIS database and that will allow you to login as that user on your box.
You will likely not be able to login as "root" because the root password is
probably stored locally on the box. But I don't remember if you can create
an account called something else ("toor" is a favourite of mine) with a UID
of 0 and login as that.
Once you are in as root just use the eeprom command to change the settings.
Something like
eeprom security-mode=none
Should be good enough
Other ideas. You could pop the nvram/rtc chip out and just turn on the
machine without it. OBP will limp along without it and then you can boot
from a Solaris cdrom, get to a prompt (just exit the installer), then you
can mount the root filesystem and remove the root password and edit
/etc/nsswitch.conf ensuring that all mentions of NIS are removed.
Then power off, replace the nvram/rtc, power on, let it boot and login as
root and use the eeprom command from there.
Lots of fun for all the family :-)
Hope this helps
Richard
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