[TUHS] Maintenance mode on AIX

[Ron Natalie]

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