Taking your DIY Dice Machine home

There are probably better/cleaner/more principled ways, but at least what is reported here works

1. Use the grub password [ask CST for this] to change the boot sequence to include init=/bin/sh, to get a shell before /sbin/init runs;
2. mount -o remount -rw /dev/sda1 [or whatever]
3. Edit /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow to remove the root password;
4. exec /sbin/init s
5. From the resulting root shell, edit
   • /var/lib/lcfg/components/common/passwd to remove the root password;
   • /etc/sysconfig/network to have the right gateway for your local network
   • /etc/hosts to have the right IP address for your machine on your local network
   • /etc/resolv.conf to have the right DNS for your network situation
   • /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 to have the right addresses
   • run /etc/rc.d/init.d/network start
   • [this is all really too early, as it gets overwritten by the LCFG eth0 step, but I was trying to get the net running in time to allow authentication to work -- never going to happen]
6. exit, resuming the boot

That worked, in that it got me to a prompt where I could login as root with no passwd, set the password for root and myself, and login as myself. Redoing the IP address fixups and .../network restart got me on the net. Of course the console is full of complaints about authentication server problems, but you can just ignore all that.

-- Main.ht - 09 Jan 2008