Reset Password in A/UX

[Dennis Nedry]

I got a Quadra 700 that had A/UX installed on it (COOL!) and I've been playing around with it. It asks for a login, and if I type in root, it logs in fine and puts me in a terminal. I looked around and found "ted" in the users folder, so I promptly logged out and tried logging in as Ted. But there is a password on that account. How can I reset, or BETTER YET, crack that password?

Also, all the pictures I've seen of A/UX seem to have a Finder on them. Why do I go to a terminal when I log in? Does Finder have to be manually launched somehow?

 

[porter]

As root do the following to reset the password,

passwd ted

life is too short to waste cracking passwords if you don't need to.

 

[Dennis Nedry]

As root do the following to reset the password,

passwd ted

life is too short to waste cracking passwords if you don't need to.

Thanks for the info to reset the password. There is something in me that is a little curious to see what the password was though, rather than to just destroy it.

Each Mac I get has lots of stuff on the hard drive, and I like to leave it as original as possible. It gives them character. Some have cool desktop patterns, some have this version or that version of Mac OS, some have files just EVERYWHERE scattered around, others are very organized with lots of folders and colored labels. I've seen so many weird control panels and extensions you wouldn't believe it. I even have a couple where people must have been playing with ResEdit. That's quite entertaining to see what they all did. The only modifications I make are to fix extension conflicts and break passwords. Also cleaning and repairing the actual hardware.

If I formatted them all and reinstalled, all that history would be lost forever, and they'd just be a regular old Mac again just like brand new, as if they never did what they did best.

Does anyone know how to launch the A/UX Finder on this beast?

 

[porter]

Does anyone know how to launch the A/UX Finder on this beast?

Do you mean the normal Macintosh desktop? You should be running "macgetty" at startup. Check it is executable.

No I'm the reverse, you have no idea what crap and corruption is on the machine, sure having a virus may give it character but it's not what I want.

I want clean machines where I know exactly what is on them.

 

[beachycove]

root can do what it likes with users and their passwords, but to be frank, this poking around in other people's business is not the sort of thing we should be doing. The better thing would be to delete the user, or better yet, go through the process of a complete re-installation so that you get to set up and use A/UX the way you want it. The default installation is not exactly optimal, largely because the defaults were set before large drives and lots of memory were a dime a dozen. There are some useful guides on the 'net.