Rooting a local box

[Nicholas Leippe]

On Thursday 26 April 2007, Matthew Walker wrote:
> Boot to single user mode (add 'single' to kernel parameters in the
> bootloader) and use passwd to reset it. :)
>
> On Thu, April 26, 2007 11:55 am, Matthew Frederico wrote:
> > We have a local box that needs some rooting to happen to it because
> > nobody knows the root password.
> >
> > Anybody have a sane way to go about this
> > -  I was considering using a live-cd of some sort, mounting the drive
> > (SCSI) and editing /etc/passwd /etc/shadow
> >
> > Any thoughts, ideas etc?

On some distros, even single user asks for the root password. You can get past 
that by passing init=/bin/sh to the kernel. If you have /bin/bb, even better. 
Where to go from there is left as an exercise for the reader.