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I've lost the root password of our filer. I've read in the SA Guide that I can change it by booting from a diskete. However, the filer is up and running. How can I reboot it in a safe manner having no access to its command line (short of powering it down)?

If you still have rsh access from one or more admin hosts, you can probably 'rsh filername reboot' even if you can't telnet in directly.

First off, the simplest thing is that you don't need to power it off cleanly. I can't take any of mine down right now, but doesn't a halt or reboot still replay the wafl log on reboot (ie, doesn't force it to flush)?

In either case, even if you don't have rsh access, hopefully you still have an admin host.. do a 'showmount -e toaster' and see who /vol/vol0 is exported to, and give it a shot from there.. ..Then just edit hosts.equiv and give yourself whatever rsh access you need.

(where does a filer store passwords, anyways?)

..kg..

From TTSG on Tue, 13 Jun 2000 10:26:17 EDT:

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I've lost the root password of our filer. I've read in the SA Guide that I can change it by booting from a diskete. However, the filer is up and running. How can I reboot it in a safe manner having no access to its command line (short of powering it down)?

**THIS IS TOTALLY UNTESTED**

I would think if you failed a drive, the system would bring itself down cleanly after X hours.

How do you fail the disk without console access? Pull it out of the filer? What if it has lots of spares? How do you know you're pulling volume disks and not spares? How do you know when the rebuild is complete?

I would *NOT* recommend this approach.

The best course of action is the suggestion to rsh in a halt or reboot from a trusted host. It works and poses no threat to filesystem integrity.

If there aren't any trusted hosts, I'd wait until a time of low usage and press the reset switch located on the front panel of the filer. It is a small button on F500 and F600 series filers and a small hole with a button behind it (like a calculator reset switch) on F200/300 and F700 series filers. This will drop the filer to an "ok" prompt where you can type "sync" to dump core. Then it can be rebooted with the floppy to change the password. The WAFL log should be replayed out of NVRAM with no damage to the filesystem when the system is booted.

This *CAN* cause filesystem corruption, however we've never seen corruption due to an unclean shut-down like this. NVRAM has always saved our butts and that's probably why we keep comming back to NetApp. =)

Good luck Gustavo!

Oh, and don't forget to add a trusted host once you get the filer back under control! =)

-- Jeff

-- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jeff Krueger E-Mail: jeff@qualcomm.com NetApp File Server Lead Phone: 858-651-6709 IT Engineering and Support Fax: 858-651-6627 QUALCOMM, Incorporated Web: www.qualcomm.com

scl@sasha.acc.virginia.edu (Steve Losen) writes:

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Do you have an admin box with root access? If so, you can rsh from that box (assuming that it's unix) and reboot it that way. The comand would look like this:

rsh filer reboot

If the admin box is NT, I can't help you.

Good Luck Kellie

And if you don't have any unix box with rsh access, but you do have NFS or CIFS access that allows you to edit /etc/hosts.equiv, then you can give any unix host rsh access and use it to run halt.

Always supposing you haven't shot yourself in the foot by running 5.3.x and setting telnet.hosts, of course!

Chris Thompson University of Cambridge Computing Service, Email: cet1@ucs.cam.ac.uk New Museums Site, Cambridge CB2 3QG, Phone: +44 1223 334715 United Kingdom.