[TUHS] Maintenance mode on AIX

The thread with a similar name reminds me of this story. My little company did a lot of special work for IBM (Federal Sector) from putting a second network card into Secure XENIX to porting the 370/PS2 AIX to two i860 cards. Occassionally, we’d get random other IBM hardware dropped on us. One day an RS/6000 showed up. The problem was that they didn’t give us any indication what the logins were (let alone the root password). Being the long time security “investigator” that I was I started poking around at the thing while waiting for IBM to call me back. The thing had a key switch that switched you from power OFF to NORMAL ot a WRENCH icon (maintenance mode). So I powered it up in the wrench mode. The thing booted up Unix but rather than a shell gave some maintenance program. I poked around at the options hoping for something that would be useful for me without luck. One option was to view the documentation so I brought that up and it displayed some text. The neat thing (for me) was that it used ‘more’ to paginate it. Sure enough, when I got to the end of the first page, I could just hit ! at the prompt and get a root shell. It was then pretty easy to get the machine set up to our liking. -Ron