new post: Changing the root password in recent SmartOS

_posts/2014-05-12-changing-the-root-password-in-recent-smartos.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: Changing the root password in recent SmartOS
+date: 12.05.2014 22:02
+---
+
+Back in 2012 Jonathan Perkin wrote a little bit about [SmartOS and the global zone][perkin],
+why and what in SmartOS is mounted read-only.
+
+Back then `/etc/shadow`, the file containing the root password, was mounted with write permissions.
+It is not anymore:
+
+~~~shell
+# ls -l /etc/shadow
+-r--------   1 root     root         560 May 12 19:51 /etc/shadow
+~~~
+
+And thus `passwd` will fail when trying to change the password.
+But it's easy to circumvent this. It's actually a lofs-mount as can be seen:
+
+~~~shell
+# mount | grep shadow
+/etc/shadow on /usbkey/shadow read/write/setuid/devices/dev=1690008 on Mon May 12 20:05:36 2014
+~~~
+
+So to change your password use the following:
+
+~~~shell
+/usr/lib/cryptpass your-fancy-password
+# replace crypt string in /usbkey/shadow
+umount /etc/shadow
+mount -F lofs /usbkey/shadow /etc/shadow
+~~~
+
+1. will create the crypt string of your password. Make sure to remove it from your bash history afterwards
+2. place this string in `/usbkey/shadow` (it's the long string between the first two `:`)
+3. unmount the file in place
+4. remount the right file back in place
+
+And that's it, the new root password is set.
+
+[perkin]: http://www.perkin.org.uk/posts/smartos-and-the-global-zone.html