Gaining access to root password

E

erok123

Registered
Good morning all,

I recently took advantage of the plunging prices of the G4 Power Macs and ordered a Sawtooth from a used Mac vendor online. It has a fresh version of 10.3.9 installed, 512mb of ram. I'm extremely happy with it. I have a Windows machine of the same vintage, it's no comparison.

How do I get to the root account? The machine came with a user called admin that seems to have administrator privledges, but I can't su to root in the terminal. I do have a 10.2 osx disk, but I didn't want to try and reboot from that to set the root password, since it's an earlier version.

If anyone knows the answer to my problem, I'd be gratefull.

Eric
 
you know that root is not to be used lightly, then? root is for VERY occaisional use, and for very acute cases, and gives you ultimate control over everything (which is bad, as computers are a see-saw of careful balance these days)

right, that out of the way, in your utilities folder within 'Applications', there's a program called Net Info Manager. open this, and under the 'Security' menu, click authorise, then enter your password. now go back to that menu and click 'enable root user'. if you log out now, you will be able to log in as root.
 
I know about root, I'm an old UNIX guy. Just can't stand the thought of owning a machine and not having the root password! Thank you for your help. Maybe it will be enough just to know I can access it I want to. :)

Eric
 
It is a royal pita having to sudo for every single command when
doing multiple tasks that specifically require root level access.

Typing sudo -s and entering your admin password when
prompted will log you in as root - after you are done tinkering,
just type exit and you are back to admin level account access.
 

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Can you sudo the su command? Either way: It's not _exactly_ the same thing. Gives you a different path description as result. ;)
 
Yup. sudo su works fine for me. I get root, with my path defs.

sudo -s gives me my paths and roots paths (repeats of the basic paths, or specific to root?).

I usually get by nicely with just plain old sudo, though. :)
 
I notice sudo su does not require a password if you are running
an admin level account, but sudo -s does require a password.



very interesting.....
 
erm, did you perform a "sudo ..." operation in the previous 5 minutes-ish?

sudo su requests my password unless I've recently issued a sudo command.
 
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