Netinfo Manager help needed

[garymum4d]

Please help. While I was on vacation, someone has tried to change the short name of our OSX Server by opening netinfo manager, going to users, highlighting the main user, authenticating, then changed the name. I dont know why they did this but now we cannot install anything because it will not except the password. I have tried to change it back but again it will not let me modify the directory.

How can I get back to how it was without re installing?

 

[scruffy]

Is there only one user who is an administrator? If someone else is, you should be able to authenticate as that user.

If not, your next best bet would be booting off the CD and changing the administrator password. It's in the menus somewhere, I don't know offhand.

Failing all that, you might have to boot into single-user mode (hold down cmd-opt-s-u at boot). Then make the disk writeable with

mount -uw /

Then you can use nicl (NetInfo Command Line) to change the database info. I can't give you exact steps, but here's an example - I changed the user login picture for my own account. You'd need to examine all the values, and probably change the name back to what it should be, maybe some other values too.

$ nicl .
/ > cd users
/users > ls
...
67 mark
...
/users > cd mark
/users/mark > read .
...
picture: /Library/Caches/com.apple.user501pictureCache.userImage
...
/users/mark > create . picture /
/users/mark > read . picture
picture: /
/users/mark > create . picture /Library/Caches/com.apple.user501pictureCache.userImage
/users/mark > read . picture
picture: /Library/Caches/com.apple.user501pictureCache.userImage
/users/mark > quit
Goodbye

 

[garymum4d]

Is there only one user who is an administrator? If someone else is, you should be able to authenticate as that user.

If not, your next best bet would be booting off the CD and changing the administrator password. It's in the menus somewhere, I don't know offhand.

Failing all that, you might have to boot into single-user mode (hold down cmd-opt-s-u at boot). Then make the disk writeable with

mount -uw /

Then you can use nicl (NetInfo Command Line) to change the database info. I can't give you exact steps, but here's an example - I changed the user login picture for my own account. You'd need to examine all the values, and probably change the name back to what it should be, maybe some other values too.

$ nicl .
/ > cd users
/users > ls
...
67 mark
...
/users > cd mark
/users/mark > read .
...
picture: /Library/Caches/com.apple.user501pictureCache.userImage
...
/users/mark > create . picture /
/users/mark > read . picture
picture: /
/users/mark > create . picture /Library/Caches/com.apple.user501pictureCache.userImage
/users/mark > read . picture
picture: /Library/Caches/com.apple.user501pictureCache.userImage
/users/mark > quit
Goodbye

Thanks Scruffy. I have tried to log in as another admin user but it still won't work. So I'm going to try the boot CD method. if that fails, then i'll take a deep breath and try the single user thing. I'm new to UNIX (Mac old school) and doing things like this make me very nervous

Thanks again