This short article describe how to reset lost root password on Linux system. IMPORTANT: This method require physical access to the machine.
On GRUB screen select normal boot option:
Press ‘e’ to edit selected option. You will see short GRUB code.
Search for the line starting with “linux /boot/vmlinuz…” or similar depending of Linux distribution. This is the place where kernel and rootfs is selected. Change ‘ro’ option to ‘rw’ and add: Continue Reading
PHPMyAdmin is an useful tool for MySQL database managing. The GUI is well-known and easy to use. It is often used in a shared hosting but an out of the box version has a small disadvantage. It allows root login. We can of course set a complicated password but the problem still exists and someone who stole root’s password can easily manage our whole database server.
There is a nice trick allowing to change a forgotten root password for MySQL on Debian Linux without database stopping. Just look into this file.
# cat /etc/mysql/debian.cnf # Automatically generated for Debian scripts. DO NOT TOUCH! [client] host = localhost user = debian-sys-maint password = u372tK6cEsTLbz0n socket = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock [mysql_upgrade] host = localhost user = debian-sys-maint password = u372tK6cEsTLbz0n socket = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock basedir = /usr
Simply login using this credentials and execute the query as follows.
mysql> SET PASSWORD FOR root@localhost = password('new-password');
Debian-sys-maint account was used as a backdoor ;).