SunBlade 100 Unknown Login and Password

[Zippytheturtle]

I have inherited a Sun Sparc Blade100 as a result of a
merger. I have no IT support for the box but I did manage to get my hands on a virgin sealed box of Solaris 8 Sparc Platform Edition. Please advise of next steps to get the old login off this thing or to reinstall the software. The Sparc has a CD-ROM drive, floppy drive and what looks like some sort of flash media or EPROM card slot. Have tried putting installation CD into CD-ROM and pressing stop+a to get OK prompt...typed "boot cdrom" per the instructions but when I press enter nothing happens. I've been away from Sparcs for a long time and never installed my own software on them so don't discount the obvious solutions.

 

[bfitzmai]

When you entered boot cdrom, did you see the cdrom being accessed? If not, from the ok> prompt, enter command devalias. This should list device aliases stored in nvram. cdrom should be one of them. May-be someone got cute and changed the name.

Don't use the installation disk... Use the Software disk 1 of 2. Now comes the question as to what you want to do. Do you want to do a fresh install or fix your existing installation.

If you want to do a fresh install, from the ok> prompt, enter boot cdrom. Just follow the instructions. The installation will go through sysid. This is where you enter nodename, network information, time information. You will need to know a nodename, if you are putting this workstation on the network. If so, you will need IP address, subnet information, domain information, name service information.

I can only assume you don't know the root password. So if you want to fix the existing installation, you will have to reset the root password. I am going through the procedure to make sure I have it right. Will post this procedure later today.

 

[bfitzmai]

To reset the unknown root password do the following. Again using the Solaris 8 Software disk 1 of 2.

At the ok> prompt enter boot cdrom -s

This will put you into Single User Mode.

at the # prompt enter the following commands:

csh
setenv TERM vt220
mkdir mnt0
mount /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 /tmp/root/mnt0 NOTE: This assumes the root partition in on disk partition "A".

If you get a mount error to run the fsck, enter command "fsck -y /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s0". Then rerun the mount command.

cd mnt0/etc
vi shadow

Edit the "root" entry of the shadow file, removing all characters between the 1st and 2nd ":". Save the file.

At the # prompt enter init 6

This will remove the root password. From here you can do just about anything you want. Once you login as root, use command "passwd" to set the root password.

 

[Zippytheturtle]

That worked exactly as you suggested. Apparently however I need to override the username and password for the Solaris 8 desktop login as well. But I am sure we would need root level access to the machine to do that so guess this is one step out of the way. Would you know where to go to either remove the presently stored username and password or just add a new one.

 

[bfitzmai]

Login into CDE (Common Desktop Environment) as root. Start a terminal window. Enter command: "admintool &". You should see a list of default users and all users with accounts on the workstation. You can use admintool to remove all the users. Do not remove default users. You can also create users using this tool. Common place to place users in a stand alone environment is /export/home.

 

[Zippytheturtle]

Excellent! I am in and running Gnome desktop. Thank you very much kind sir. I'll tinker with it to see if I can get it up and running so I can telnet to some of our Unix boxes before I come back to be spoon fed again.