Getting Started, Documentation, Tips & Tricks

I have recently acquired an O2, and am trying to reset the root password so I can actually do anything with it (it has a version of IRIX on it I do not presently have and would like to keep). I attempted the sgizone.net method of using the installation media to enter a shell and use /root/bin/vi to edit the passwd file directly; however, vi is throwing a fatal error: Cannot successfully map soname 'libcurses.so' under... somethingrather, a lot of what appear to be other system file names follow.

Can anyone give me a suggestion on where to go from here? I cannot find much of anything else on how to progress.

set LD_LIBRARY_PATH?

Alternatively, can you not simply do a "chroot" to the root of your real file system and run passwd from there?

I do not know what you mean by either of these incantations.

Assume I am a jellybrain, as for almost everything related to IRIX administration I am.

http://www.nekochan.net/wiki/index.php/ ... rd_removal

I have already attempted the method described there via CDROM, which gave me the error in the first post. I do not know how to mount the drive on another system. Finally, the Jack the Ripper idea won't work very well, as the network was configured for a different network setup than the one I have and thus cannot copy the file to another system because there is no actual way to do this.

The link I usually refer to is down <at the .se nekoware mirror> - here's the next best one I could come up with:
http://software.majix.org/irix/admin-password.shtml

Here's the one from the .se nekoware mirror - it'll probably be back up soon:
http://se.mirror.nekoware.net/SGI_Info/ ... ystems.htm

Yes, I know that's the other page with the same procedure; I found this out by doing a general forum search for my problem before I posted. This is the exact same procedure that gave me the error described in the first post.

I'm suggesting something like

(assuming your real harddisk is mounted as /root)

That did the trick exactly; thank you.

Now however, I'm having another problem. This thing was used in a rather unusual network environment; in trying to set up its interfaces to deal with the local network, I seem to have managed to make it stop the booting process about halfway. This occurred immediately after changing the DNS server information in the system and nothing else (I rebooted after each change just to make sure I didn't do something like this). Any thoughts?

Perhaps your changes to DNS information affected the boot up!

Seriously though, check that you have no remote NFS mounts.

Check that you are not using yellow pages (NIS) for user accounts or anything else.

Actually, I was just being impatient; after leaving it alone for >half an hour, it timed out and let me go in to fix the problem. ^^;