Information about passwords reset

[phanhan]

Hello everyone.
I followed the instructions to install the special boot on the Pogoplug V2 and then archlinux on a USB drive. All was working fine a few months ago. However, I was just fooling around and trying to learn, and didn't have a use for a server yet.

Now I do, and I dusted off the Pogoplug, but I can't remember any passwords to anything - boot or linux. I've tried root, admin, & ceadmin for everything. Do I have any recourse here?

[krabat]

If there's a way to access the USB device from an other machine, preferably running Linux, then there's a variety of rather easy solutions:

From another Linux system, you could chroot into the root directory and change the password manually. You could e. g. use arch-chroot as described in the Arch Linux installation guide.

Also, you could edit /etc/shadow from the Pogoplug system manually. Password hashes are those lengthy strings between first and second colon in each line, starting with $6$. You could just (temporary!) delete the one from root to allow login without password or replace it. As for creating those hashes Dovecot's doveadm is the only suitable tool I know.

Last not least you could could copy id_rsa.pub as created by running ssh-keygen on the user account intended to access the Pogoplug into /root/ssh/authorized_keys on the USB drive. This allows for public key authentication and you could setup all the rest from within the Pogoplug.