Trying to recover a user password of my box for a account that was my best freinds who died two weeks ago in a car accident. I would like to recover not reset because if I can figure out what his password is it may be the password for other thing like his webpages and stuff that I would like to keep renewd and going thank you very much in advanced for any help Andrew Mahle US ARMY Signal Corps Fort Hood

John the Ripper is the standard *NIX password cracking program. Do a google search; I'm sure you'll find it. You will have to crack the password. It can't be "recovered."

I quite disagree with Jake. If you have root access to this computer just look in the /etc/passwd file goodluck eskiled My Linux Bookmarks: http://linuxcourse.rutgers.edu/rute/rute.html http://www.bitbenderforums.com/vb22/showthread.php?postid=311808 http://www.linuxcommand.org/index.php

Modern UNIX systems use shadow passwords, so /etc/passwd, being world-readable, stores everything except password hashes. That brings me to the second problem. I don't think any modern OS (I know this is true of Windows, Linux, and all the BSDs) stores user passwords. All store the result of a one-way hash algorithm processing the password. The same password will always hash to the same value, so one can compare hashes rather than passwords. Also, by the nature of the algorithm, there's only a tiny probability of different passwords hashing the same. The security advantage is that if someone manages to read your shadow file, they only get the hashes, which won't be of any immediate use because the agorithm is one-way, and won't reveal the actual passwords. Mandrake 9 probably uses an MD5-based hash algorithm, which is weaker than OpenBSD's Blowfish but significantly stronger than the traditional UNIX DES algorithm. I imagine a dictionary-based or relatively short and simple password would be feasible to crack on even a Celeron 1.4. If run as root, JTR will be able to read the shadow file, detect the hash algorithm, account for the salt, and begin cracking without the user really knowing the above background information.

haha okay :( eskiled ps. sorry i was DEAD WRONG lol My Linux Bookmarks: http://linuxcourse.rutgers.edu/rute/rute.html http://www.bitbenderforums.com/vb22/showthread.php?postid=311808 http://www.linuxcommand.org/index.php