rogerj@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (Roger Jagoda) (02/03/90)
Felloe NeXTies,
I have some "life experience" info to pass along to those
of you who possible may find yourselves in this spot some time
RSN.
Scenario: You have set a ROM hardware password for security reasons
so no one can get a NeXT system disk, boot your cube from it, become
root and mount your filesystems. Some days later you change the pass-
word just to be safe. Something goes wrong and you've typed the password
wrong or mis-spelled it. The stupid ROM monitor doesn't ask for confirmation
on the password so you have no idea at the time...until you try to issue
a boot command like "bsd" or "ben." All you can see now is "Sorry"
and a return to the ROM montior prompt.
So now you ask yourself how can I change the password again, when I don't
know the password in the first place because I mis-typed it. Well, the
answer is.....drum roll please....
Open the machine, disconnect the battery from the system board, wait
five hours and reconnect everything up again. This discharges the small
cache that holds the start-up parameters (screws up yer clock something
awfull too!) including the hardware password (i.e. there no longer is
anymore). Whoila!
Now, the moral of this story is obviously to NOT set hardware passwords
unless you're an elephant. For those of you who have to run public student
sites like ours, just have a NeXT screw driver around, some coffee, and
some patience.
BUGS to fix: The ROM monitor should ask for a confirmation on the passwd
command.
Who thought of this silly idea in the first place, just
get LockScreen from Bryce and pay him his shareware...
it's worth it!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Roger Jagoda
FQOJ@CORNELLA.CIT.CORNELL.EDU
Cornell University
dorner@pequod.cso.uiuc.edu (Steve Dorner) (02/06/90)
In article <9660@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> rogerj@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu (Roger Jagoda) writes: >Open the machine, disconnect the battery from the system board, wait >five hours and reconnect everything up again. Or remove the battery and short the battery socket for ~20 min. Steve -- Steve Dorner, U of Illinois Computing Services Office Internet: s-dorner@uiuc.edu UUCP: {convex,uunet}!uiucuxc!dorner