AS/400 password recovery

Hey All !

Our college has an old IBM AS/400 box. Having never seen that thing being used, i decided to ask the staff about this. According to them, the guy who was incharge of the box forgot the password and he was then fired. The staff never took an effort to recover the password as they didn't know anything about the box and was too lazy to learn. So a couple of students decided to try to bring that machine to good use. We tried a couple of default passwords with no results. When it comes to the AS/400 , we are absolute noobs and have no idea about its security features :confused:. Is there some way to recover the password ??.

With mid-range kit the password should be written down sealed in an envelope and stored in a fireproof safe in a remote location.............in your case the Dean or Principal's office. In mine it was the CEO and/or CFO.

IBM will be able to unlock it for you as their SEs have a couple of diskettes that let you own ANY AS/400. Remember that mid-range is mostly about physical security. (No, you cannot borrow my diskettes, I got them "on trust" and I don't break that)

What default passwords did you try?

Quote:

---

Is there some way to recover the password ??.

---

No, they will just reset security officer and systems operator to the defaults.

As you obviously do not know what you are doing, and assuming you have some way of logging into the machine DO NOT attempt to hack sysctl or use any of the hidden menu options. That is for IBM SEs.

Under no circumstances try a physical hack. It is NOT a PC.............there are some serious voltages/currents in there :zap:
;)

Thanks for the reply, Nihil. Some of the username-password combinations that we tried out are from this site -> http://www.cyxla.com/passwords/passwords.html

Resetting the passwords would be fine. AS/400 is too precious a thing to ever think of trying a physical hack ;-)

There are a few methods to try to change the password when you don't know the QSECOFR password or when the account got disabled. The easiest way is when there is a duplicate profile of QSECOFR with the same power. Then when you lost the password or the QSECOFR got disabled you can still acces the other profile and ue the CHGUSRPRF to set the user to enabled or you can change the password in case of a lost password. Offcourse in your case the probability of a duplictae user and the ability to log in to that one if it even exists is very small.
It seems that you have no option of a second profile so you need to use the dedicated service tools menu (DST). Using those dedicated service tools you can reset the password. The menu can be used during a mnual IPL. The steps to take are slightly different depending the OS/400 system (eg V5... or V4...) and you need to know the box. Is it partitioned, non-partintioned etc.
For non-partitioned boxes go to manual mode using control panel. For partitioned boxes you need to sign on to your primary partition and then change your partition startup mode to manual using the system service tool menu STRSST and the system partition option. Then IPL (Initial progrma Load, what we would call 'boot' with a pc). The system will show the DSP menu, there for system V5R1 choose option 5 dst environment. The DSP log in appears, there log in with the DST security profile, this is a DST ID of the SECOFR, the default password for the DST QSECOFR is QSECOFR. Then select option 6 security tools from the DST environment menu, and then choose the option reset operation system default password. (for V4R5 you need to choose the option DST user profiles and then reset system default passwords.) After doing that the password can be reset to it's default only for this IPL session. Go back to the DST menu and choose option 1 to IPL your system. When the system comes up change the QSECOFR back to enabled when it was disabled and change the default password in one of your one. Then put the IPL options back to normal mode. But like said in the above post if you have no clue then you better don't do the things described above.

Thanks you very much Victor for the reply. There is no duplicate security officer account in the box. So, Ill try out the second technique.