Perhaps in the course of running a SLUG, one might accidentally change the passwd for root, and then forget what the change was. The slight possibilty of this ever happening might preclude others from ever writing a HowTo on the subject, but here at NSLU2-Linux we believe in being complete. So the author offers up his humble procedure, that if executed will get your root passwd rest rather quickly.

Platform: Unslung 3.18 beta

Steps:

1. Turn off the SLUG using the power button.
2. Start up a Linux machine (my laptop dual boots to Ubuntu)
3. After Linux boots on the other machine, plug in the unslung hard disk.
4. Mount the harddrive conf partition in the linux partition(Ubuntu automounts an attached HD to /media)
5. Use your favorite editor to edit the passwd file [on most distributions it is /etc/passwd]
   Before: root:fobaVWfDOzVIs:0:0:root:/root:/bin/sh
   After: root::0:0:root:/root:/bin/sh
6. Save the passwd file.
7. Unplug the USB Hard drive from the Linux machine
8. Plug harddrive back in to SLUG and restart the SLUG
9. Enable Telnet if you don't have SSH or someother terminal acces
   Safety Note: wouldn't be a bad idea to do this while not connected to the internet...
10. Change the root passwd using ChangePasswordsFromTheCommandLine

fin.

- - -

Note that this method does not work on Unslung 5.5beta. Telnet will throw you out if you attempt to login as root with the user password field empty.

Question: Would re-slinging reset the password files?