Hello everyone,

I recently moved and before I left I changed the password on my RedHat 9.0 box. I wrote the password down on a piece of paper and have unfortunately lost it. I've searched everywhere and it's no where to be found.

The RedHat box is the main computer on my home network. It acts as a router, firewall, DNS, DHCP and Telnet for my home LAN. I would seriously hate to have to reinstall the box and reconfigure everything.

The only account I can log into on the box is a limited account in which I'd memorized the password.

I'm trying to figure out how I can get the root password on it without having to reinstall everything and make a new one. For some reason the Telnet server is not responding to me, port 23 is open on it but when I try and connect I'm getting nothing. I was going to try running a program called brutus but like I said the Telnet server isn't up from what I gather. Well, when I do a netstat on the RedHat box under the limited account it's listing Telnet but at the ip 0.0.0.0, so I'm confused... My local interface on the box is 192.168.1.1.....

The RedHat box actually has two network cards, eth0 acts as the public interface my ISP's DNS and DHCP servers work with and eth1 runs to a switch which I connect my workstations to. At the moment when I want on the Internet I'm connecting through a dial up connection on my Windows box. Maybe that has something to do with it (since eth0 isn't activating at boot on the RedHat box)??

Any idea's besides re-installing or searching around for a piece of paper I can't find that will get me the root password would be excellent.

The RedHat box is like I said off the Internet right now. I understand that I am asking for a privilege escalation method and that's not information you just hand out to anyone unless you feel it's okay to. If need be I can quickly install a 56k modem in the RedHat box and use a reasonable method to prove the pc is mine.

Also I have a program called Jack the ripper, I haven't used it yet but if I can figure out what file I need to get off the Linux box and a way to aquire it with a limited account that may work? The password cracking tool I use for Windows boxes is extremely fast maybe Jack the ripper would work fast as well? Of course RedHat doesn't use LAN Manager hash's right???

Thanks for any help you may provide and if no one feels comfortable helping me out I understand.