Change Root Password on several systems.

[John Palmer_5]

Would there be a way to change "Root" password on several system without having to log into each one? I'm a little new to TRU64 and have a bunch of systems that need Root changed once a month. Security with password over the network isn't a big issue.

[Ravi_8]

Hi,

No . you have to login to each machine to change the root passwd

[Ralf Puchner]

or you configure NIS and change the password global via yppasswd.

If you use 5.1B you can also configure/use an LDAP server.

[Ann Majeske]

Just a comment on Ralf's suggestion. It is NOT a good idea to serve your root password with NIS! If you have a network problem and your root password is served by NIS root can't login and fix the problem!

[Ralf Puchner]

In case of an network error nothing doesn't work within a modern company....

[Joris Denayer]

Hmm, the root password on NIS. What happens in single-user mode ?

[Ann Majeske]

You should be able to get on to the system in single user mode, even if you have sulogin set (requires root password to get to single user mode). Normal single user mode doesn't require a password. With sulogin set it will require the root password, unless it realizes that it can't get to the root password. sulogin was implemented this way deliberately, so that you could still get into single user mode to fix the system if your /etc/passwd file was missing or corrupted, for example.

This doesn't mean that its OK to remotely distribute the root password, though. I wouldn't want to have to explain to a user that I had to force a crash of the system to get it into single user mode in the middle of his three day job because the network/NIS got hosed somehow and I couldn't log in to fix it!

[Jorge Briseno · Accepted solution]

You can create a script and create a file with all the servers (hostnames) you want to change the password and do a rshell to each one of them and modify the password.