Ben Kevan’s Blog

Recover your lost Root Password openSUSE

A few days ago I recieved a funny email from someone (won’t name who, or where from) that they forgot their root password. My first thought was that they wanted to reset someone elses root password because who in the world would forget their ROOT PASSWORD. But then, I got to thinking. Maybe this person really did forget their password. So I thought I’d let him/her know how to do it:

First, reboot your machine and in the boot menu (Grub or LILO menu) put in the following:

Grub:
init=/bin/bash
LILO:
linux init=/bin/bash

Once you’re logged into the bash shell simply run:

passwd

enter in the new password twice, and then

reboot

For the security concious out there, this is one of the main reasons you should use a boot loader password. The password would keep them from changing these settings. Again they would also need physical access to the box.

Tags: opensuse, security

Microsoft Security apparently is a Bad Request

So right on the cusps of the Emergency patch release by Microsoft on Oct 17th, I decided to try to read up on it (I run Linux, so I was immune anyways). Read More about that here

But to my surprise when I went to go read up on security on Microsoft’s stuff, I thought “Hey, they must have a security subdomail”, so I went to security.microsoft.com and here is what I got:

Click for image for full size picture

How I read that is Microsoft Security is a Bad Request (or a request that cannot be fulfilled).

Just thought I’d share with you guys, it made me laugh.

Tags: Microsoft, security