Continuing tale of the Powerserver 320H

From: Carlos Murillo <cmurillo_at_emtelsa.multi.net.co>
Date: Fri Nov 23 21:43:41 2001

Hi Peter;

At 09:28 PM 11/23/01 GMT, Pete wrote:
>On Nov 23, 14:44, Carlos Murillo wrote:
>> #ls
>> ls: not found
>> #vi
>> vi: not found
>I'm no AIX expert, and I've not used it in years. I think 3.2 uses shared
>libraries, and vi probably needs something in a library that's not mounted
>(or not in the right place) when running the limited maintenance shell.
> I'm surprised ls doesn't work, though.

So far, the $program: not found error seems to indicate actual
non-existence of the file... when the file exists but something
else goes awry, either "killed" or "cannot execute" shows up..

  The shell should support ls, dd,
>backup, restore, chown, mkfs, mknod, mount, and things like that. And of
>course, our editor of choice: ed.
>
>> #cat /etc/mnttab

>Have a look in /etc/filesystems and see what it thinks it should mount for
>"mount all". I think AIX actually deletes /etc/mnttab as part of the
>normal startup, and does a "touch /etc/mnttab" to leave an empty file.
 
see below

>> #getrootfs
>> usage: /usr/sbin/getrootfs [-f] diskname
>> -f disregard status of hd5
>> Available disks: location:
>> hdisk0 00-01-00-00
>>
>> #getrootfs -f hdisk0
>> Importing Volume Group...
>> rootvg
>> /dev/rhd4 (/): ** Unmounted cleanly - Check supressed
>> /dev/rhd2 (/usr): ** Unmounted cleanly - Check supressed
>> /usr/sbin/getrootfs: mount: not found
>> checking all mounts and the existance of df
>> /usr/sbin/getrootfs: mount: not found
>> /usr is not mounted

It seems that the original / and /usr were located at
/dev/hd4 and /dev/hd2, since I was able to mount them
later on...

>
>> # passwd
>> cannot execute
>
>Probably the executable isn't in your PATH.

No, apparently when the file isn't found the msg is ": not found" .
I tried all sane locations for the passwd program. "cannot execute"
means something else, perhaps a permissions or restricted shell issue.

> If you have the filesystems
>mounted (BTW, why "mymnt" not just "mnt"? That's what mnt is for) you can
>add the relevant directories
>
>PATH=/mymnt/hd2/bin:$PATH

I did something similar; I copied all stuff in the ram-based /usr
to another ram-based /usr1 and added /usr1/bin, /usr1/sbin and so
on to the path, the idea being that after I used getrootfs I would not
lose the previously available tools (while getrootfs seemed to change
the actual anchoring of / from the ram to the HD device, it failed to
properly mount /usr; however, the earlier ram-based tree at /usr became
unavailable after the execution of getrootfs, leaving out the "mount" program,
even though the mounting of /dev/hd2 at /usr had failed)

>but it might be better (if you just have two partitions on the hard drive)
>to mount hd2 directly on /mnt, and then mount hd4 on /mnt/usr. At least
>then things will be in the correct places relative to each other. There
>isn't a directory called "/root", is there?

Yes, I did not keep relative mounting closeness in my arrangement.
I'll have to check about the existence of /root (I'm away
from the machine now)

>You could try the "users" command, though I expect it only works on a
>normal system (ie not from the maintenacne shell, which is sort of a mini
>system, like the miniroot or standalone shell in IRIX and Solaris). If you
>can edit /etc/passwd with ed, you can probably remove the password field
>from root's entry, leaving a null field (no password).

No ed so far;

>> typing
>> # cat /mymnt/hd4/etc/passwd
>
>> reveals that AIX seems to have shadow passwords but I can't find any
>> of the usual files (master* etc) .

>Possibly in /etc/security/passwd, /etc/security/group, and so on. Don't
>believe AIX is UNIX. It's not.

Indeed.

/mymnt/hd4/etc/security/passwd and opasswd exist, but they
are in a totally unknown format--anything like unix.

Coud I replace a known encrypted (that is, under another unix
variant) password in the corresponding token?

carlos.

--------------------------------------------------------------
Carlos E. Murillo-Sanchez carlos_murillo_at_nospammers.ieee.org
Received on Fri Nov 23 2001 - 21:43:41 GMT