OT: Mac OSX Server administrator account

Alex Rice alrice at ARCplanning.com
Tue Mar 4 08:56:01 EST 2003


On Monday, March 3, 2003, at 02:37  PM, RGould8 at aol.com wrote:

> This is off-topic, but somewhat relevant for me, as we're storing all 
> our Revolution apps on a host server.  My question is this - - - - 
> someone I managed to mess up our Mac OS X Server in that my 
> administrator account is gone - - - - - I can still log in as 
> administrator in the Mac OS itself, but no longer in the Workgroup 
> Manager.  Is there a root administrator account I could use, or a hack 
> to get into the Workgroup Manager for my server?

I don't know about the Workgroup Manager, having only used OS X server 
a little bit.

OS X, like NEXT, uses NetInfo for it's passwords and administrative 
info. In theory you can change any setting anywhere on the network, and 
it will be updated in the server, as long as you specify the correct 
netinfo domain, not the local machine domain. It's kind of a mystery, 
though I was sysadmin on some NEXT machines recently, I don't 
understand it.

- As far as the root account, yes that's always a fallback 
administrator account on every OS X machine. First try logging in as 
root with your same password. It could work.

- If necessary, enable the root account first. Gotta be administrator 
to do this! See Knowledge Base #106290

- Worst case scenario: Reboot the computer holding down Command-S. This 
will put you in single-user mode. It's a Unix shell with root access, 
and a stripped down environment. Disks may or may not be mounted, 
services not started up, etc. You could change passwords or (Maybe) 
issue netinfo commnds (start with ni-) from there. Or do limitless 
damage to your setup ;-)

If you can become root on the Server machine, Workgroup Manager should 
allow you to add your administrative account back in.

Alex Rice, Software Developer
Architectural Research Consultants, Inc.
alrice at ARCplanning.com
alrice at swcp.com






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