Ketema's Notes

Well I had the most stressing night. Didn't get to bed until 2 am due to the first problem I have ever had with my Mac. A little history: I own a Powerbook G4. Top of the line at its time: Superdrive, 1 Gig of ram 80 GB hard drive, 1.67 Ghz processor. It has been the best personal computer I have ever used, absolutely no problems...Until yesterday. It all started because I have become extremely security concious. I have always had a pretty decent password, but it was always the same password...FOR EVERYTHING. So a few months ago I happened to notice a bunch of failed login attempts on the only windows box I have in my entire network, which I keep open for remote desktop purposes. That little scare combined with my new job of finding spyware on the internet and figuring out how it works, led to realize perhaps I needed to change my habits. So I got all security happy. I regenerated all my passwords, made my mail server use SSL, put my passwords on a rotation schedule, closed some of the ports on my firewall/router I rarely use the whole works. Now I really didn't expect to have any problems with my laptop, but I put it on the same password schedule as all my other computers. Changing the passwords regularly is hard enough, but if had to remember different ones I think my brain would explode.

So this brings us to yesterday morning. I got the little calendar reminder that said I needed to change my password. No biggie I go through all my servers first, then for the mac. I go to the System Preferences, Users, click the change password button, voila, easy. Then I go eat breakfast. When I come back my screen saver is running like always except I had this new one I got from version tracker. It lets you play quicktime movies for your saver. I jiggle the mouse get the password prompt, type in my new password and...Uh-uh, no go. Hmmm maybe I typed it wrong, I try again...Nope. Shit, now what? OK lets try the old one...Nope. Oh damn now I stressed. Then I relax a little and approach it logically, hell I have fixed/broken, repaired computers all my life. Never had a challenge I didn't eventually solve and this would be no different.

I rebooted the mac and tried just logging in. No go. Apparently something had happened that corrupted my password. I still don't know what, perhaps a synchronization problem? Did the screen saver not update when I changed the password in the Preference panel? Was I supposed to log out and back in after the change? I don't know, but I do know that I was stuck. Well I knew that these macs had something called target mode where I could mount it on another mac as a hard drive. That would be nice if I had another mac. So off to Google it was. I found several posts and forums that taught me about Single User Mode and just booting off my installation CD to reset the password. OK the CD approach sounded easiest. So I booted mac holding down the 'C' key and booted of my Tiger installation disk. Right up in the menu bar was a Utilities menu with 'Reset Password' on it. My heart felt light, then plummeted as the program failed to run. What! I couldn't believe it, what the F was going on? I tried again. Nope, as soon as I clicked on my MacHD to get a list of users the program just crashed. I found a log, opened it and saw a bunch of errors I didn't feel like reading, but knew it was due to the reset program not able to do something. Grrr...

Next option, lets try that single user mode thing. I rebooted the mac and this time held down the to Apple and 'S' keys. After a few seconds I was presented with a bash prompt and..."macpc:~ root#" Hell yeah! I immediately begin to type passwd, then back up and read the screen..oh gotta mount the drive first, so I type what it tells me to: /sbin/fsck -fy ... that takes a while, and it says it fixed a few things, but then I type /sbin/mount -uw / and I am in. Oh yes I can see the promise land. I follow the directions I found on the Internet saying I had to start some system services in order to use the passwd command so I type /sbin/SystemStarter I get some messages saying my postgreSQL database didn't start, but other than that I am at prompt and expectantly type passwd. Nothing. It just sits there. Ok, lets see what I did wrong: man passwd I get this synopsis: passwd [-i infosystem] [-l location] [name], hmm I don't know what the infosystem is, I figure my location is going to be /etc/passwd and name should be my account name. So I try passwd ketema then I get a prompt! Sigh, I go ahead and set a new passwd then reboot. AND I STILL CAN'T FREAKING LOG IN! Damn, now I'm pissed. What was wrong?

I reboot back in single user mode and read everything. Often time I am guilty of not having patience and not looking at the obvious. At the bottom of the screen just before the login prompt. It tells me that if I wish to make changes to files to run the fsck command, and the mount command, but then it also says that if I wish to start the system but stay in single user mode to run sh /etc/rc I did this then tried passwd ketema again. I got the prompt and changed my password (so I thought) but upon reboot still could not log into my account. Now I did some Zen breathing and tried again, this time after running the sh /etc/rc command I waited. Almost an hour. I did nothing until I got that little prompt back. (Before I had pressed enter cause the prompt was taking a little while) this time I tried passwd root. I changed the passwd, rebooted...and Logged in as root. JEEZ! I then used the User Preferences to change my normal account password. While I was in there I noticed that I had the File Vault turned on. Could this have added to my difficulty? I checked my MASTER password and it was still the same, no problems changing it. But how could that have avoided me some potential headaches? Not sure, but was the encryption what made this whole process more difficult? I read up on it more, but in the mean time I am glad to say I am back into my mac. I had to reset my keychain because it apparently still needed the "ghost" password that didn't exist. This can be accomplished easily enough my choosing the "reset my keychain" option from the Keychain menu.

If any one runs across this problem in the future I hope this little tutorial helps you and that you have faster success than I did.