[tyler_fitz]

Ok, so heres the story:

I am a student of Nickerson Highschool, and this year, every student gets their own laptop, an ibook to be exact. Well, not every student is computer savvy, but some of us are. A select few students were chosen to be on the STEALTH Team (Student Tech Experts Administrating LapTop Help)and I was one of those students (even though i know nothing about macs). Well, in order for the stealth to do a good job helpin people, we would need administrative privlages, so, they gave us the administrator password. Well time went by and almost everyone in the whole school knew the password, and they screwed up their computers. So the school decided to take the laptops back and reconfigure them (i dont know what they did, but when i got mine back everything that i put on it was gone). Well, i wanted to find out if they changed the administrator password....and....they did.....

So, now i need a way to find out what the password is, or figure out how to make my account an administrator account

any help would be greatly appreciated

[tyler_fitz]

bump......

[Millennium]

Talk to the people who reconfigured the laptops. They should be able to supply you with the password.

[tyler_fitz]

Thats not going to work, there is a reason the changed the password. Some members of the stealth team told their friends what the password was, and their friends told friends so and and so forth, thats why they reconfigured the laptops. So now nobody knows the password....(except about 3 teachers....and i dont know who they are...)

[Parky]

The only way to find out the password is to ask the person who set it.

That's the whole point!

Ian

[Randman]

Sounds dodgy.
You can ask the teachers to give the password, if your story is true. Or you can have the IT people reconfigure all of the iBooks and passwords, if the story is true.
I'd be surprised if schools give other students administrative rights over other people's iBooks, but even if they did, if you can't figure out on your own how to solve the problem, that's not a very good sign that you're helpful.
Btw, use spellcheck.

[Millennium]

Originally posted by tyler_fitz:
Thats not going to work, there is a reason the changed the password. Some members of the stealth team told their friends what the password was, and their friends told friends so and and so forth, thats why they reconfigured the laptops. So now nobody knows the password....(except about 3 teachers....and i dont know who they are...)

So in essence they're disbanding STEALTH, am I right?

Ask them this outright. Your team apparently cannot do its job without the admin password, but they refuse to give the password to the team, so it's essentially meaningless. If they disband your team, then there's not much we can really do to help you, but the least they could do is be forthright about it.

[Spliffdaddy]

Just send all the troubled iBooks to the 3 teachers that have the admin password.

The problem will solve itself in short order.

[tyler_fitz]

yeah, pretty much, no more stealth team

[utidjian]

Originally posted by tyler_fitz:
yeah, pretty much, no more stealth team

I have several comments and suggestions:

1. The teachers that thought up the STEALTH idea didn't think it through. As they learned, in retrospect, it was a pretty dumb idea to begin with. With everyone given the exact same admin account and password the STEALTH team was also given anonymity... no way to trace who was responsible for the leak or the screwed up laptops.

2. The teachers should have trained you properly.

3. The situation you are in now is the one they should have started with... until you are all trained.

4. It is not neccessary that STEALTH team have admin rights in order to help the other students in using the iBooks. If the iBooks are setup correctly to begin with there is nothing interfering with the use of the applications on the machine. Students will need the most help with using the applications and the GUI. No one needs to be admin to do that.

5. The teachers now have the problem of how to keep a lot (possibly hundreds) of laptops updated. Just installing new software will be a HUGE task for only three teachers. Not much of a problem if they are desktops that stay fixed in a lab but for internittently connected laptops... probably via Airport it is a problem.

6. The problems with the STEALTH program at your school point out one aspect of the whole 'Macs-in-Schools' thing. Especially so with laptops that are issued to students. The problem is not unique to iBooks or Macs in general... your school would have had similar problems if they had issued the students with PC laptops running Linux and probably a LOT worse if they were running Windows.

What to do about it? There are several things I would do differently... to be listed in my next post.

[Xeo]

Originally posted by utidjian:
5. The teachers now have the problem of how to keep a lot (possibly hundreds) of laptops updated. Just installing new software will be a HUGE task for only three teachers. Not much of a problem if they are desktops that stay fixed in a lab but for internittently connected laptops... probably via Airport it is a problem.

Macs don't generally have to stay updated to function. They could be updated once a semester or even once a year and still be OK. Should some massive security concern arise, then maybe they would have to do an emergency update session, but we've never had anything like that yet so staying up-to-date to avoid it would be more trouble than it's worth.

[Angus_D]

Originally posted by Xeo:
Macs don't generally have to stay updated to function.

You should absolutely apply all the latest updates as soon as possible. Leaving known security issues unpatched is just bad practice.

Don't think that Macs are invincible. They aren't. Be a good sysadmin and keep your users safe.

[storer]

you may just have to wait to find out. i doubt there is an easy security workaround, if at all.

[Angus_D]

If they haven't enabled Open Firmware Password, you can probably quite easily get administrator rights. If they have, you can probably still do it with some effort.

Note however that doing so is probably in violation of your school's Acceptable Use Policy or something similar, and violating that is probably grounds for immediate suspension (or worse).

[tyler_fitz]

lets say i got my hands on a teachers laptop, and their account was an administrator, is there anyway i could find out the password from there?

[Angus_D]

Probably not easily, no, and again, doing so would undoubtedly be a bad idea.

[megasad]

Originally posted by tyler_fitz:
So, now i need a way to find out what the password is, or figure out how to make my account an administrator account...

If you have an external FireWire hard drive / an iPod large enough to contain the contents of the iBook plus a few GBs more and a set of OS X install discs you can do this pretty easily.

1 - Plug the FireWire harddrive into the iBook and turn it on.
2 - Put the install disc into the iBook.
3 - Turn off the iBook, hold down C when turning it on again.
4 - Partition the external drive using Disk Utility so that there is one partition large enough to hold the contents of the iBook's hard drive, another that is large enough to install OS X on.
5 - Install OS X on the second partition.
6 - Use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the current contents of the iBook into a disk image on the first partition of the external drive.

When you give the iBook back to the school, simply wipe its hard drive, with whatever you've been doing on it, and clone the contents of this disk image back on to it. They'll be none the wiser. Though you might want to put some work files on there, else they might wonder what you've been doing all year.

Anyway, once you've cloned it, you can use the same install CDs to reset the password on the iBook. Start up holding C, as before, reset it to whatever you want, make yourself an administrator, do whatever you want. Just don't let those pesky teachers know, I guess.

Wait, why do you even want to do this? I'm guessing the iBooks are meant for school work? Did they delete stuff that stops you doing your school work? You need to install software / run stuff as an admin? Because if you don't, this all seems rather pointless. Not that I wouldn't do it if I was in the same situation, just saying is all...

[Xeo]

Originally posted by Angus_D:
You should absolutely apply all the latest updates as soon as possible. Leaving known security issues unpatched is just bad practice.

Don't think that Macs are invincible. They aren't. Be a good sysadmin and keep your users safe.

I don't disagree that they aren't invincible, but with 100s of laptops in the hands of users that don't have admin access, bringing them in for monthly updates is a little extreme. Being the laptops that they are, they aren't always online and they aren't always even on a network.

As long as you teach the importance of backup, there is nothing a potential hacker could do that would cause any real problems.

[Millennium]

Originally posted by Xeo:
I don't disagree that they aren't invincible, but with 100s of laptops in the hands of users that don't have admin access, bringing them in for monthly updates is a little extreme. Being the laptops that they are, they aren't always online and they aren't always even on a network.

As long as you teach the importance of backup, there is nothing a potential hacker could do that would cause any real problems.

There, I'm afraid, I must disagree. I've been hacked before; it was my own fault for a misconfigured FTP server, but people started running a warez site out of it. Cleaning things up was a massive pain.

However, I don't understand why they're making the students bring their machines in to be updated. I've updated machines remotely over SSH before. If the school has the admin passwords then they should be able to do it too. Automating this shouldn't be too terribly difficult, given that they control the admin passwords.

[Millennium]

Originally posted by tyler_fitz:
lets say i got my hands on a teachers laptop, and their account was an administrator, is there anyway i could find out the password from there?

Do the teachers have the password written down? My guess is that they don't have the password at all, and in that case it wouldn't be any easier to get it from their machines than from your own. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the teachers' machines had a different admin password just in case someone tried it.

Either way, you would probably be expelled -or at the very least, suspended- if you actually did this, so I strongly urge you not to do it.

[utidjian]

Originally posted by tyler_fitz:
lets say i got my hands on a teachers laptop, and their account was an administrator, is there anyway i could find out the password from there?

Note: I can not overemphasize that the following techniques can get you in to a LOT of trouble. You should consider the consequences if you get caught. Ask yourself this... if you get the admin password for your iBook, what are you going to do with it? If you need to install some software you can already do that without the admin password... just install it in your own home folder. If you install it in /Applications or make any other changes to your iBook that requires admin privileges the teachers are going to know you did it. If you make an admin user type change and later change it back to the original... trying to cover your tracks... the teachers (unless they are completely clueless) are going to know. From the log files they will be able to tell WHO made the change and WHEN. Almost any attempt to cover your tracks will just make it appear even worse.
Even if you log in as admin only once the mere act of logging in as admin will be logged and they will know. Is it really worth it?

There is a very slim but non-zero probability that you can extract the plaintext password(s) from a teachers laptop (or any of the laptops).

The key is you have to get your hands on a laptop that has NOT been rebooted since the last time an admin password was used. My guess would be that the teachers user accounts are also admin accounts BUT on their own laptops. Hopefully (for them, not for you) they use different passwords for admin accounts on the laptops for distribution to the students.

If you do this (at a command prompt):

sudo strings -8 /var/vm/swapfile0 |grep -A 4 -i longname

you will see that it is sometimes possible to extract the plaintext admin password. You will need a bootable firewire or USB disk or install CD and you will have to boot from that. If the iBook reboots off of the main drive since the last time the admin password was used the swapfile will be wiped.

There is another method but it will only work IF the laptops are using non-shadow passwords. Shadow passwords didn't become the default until, at least, Panther 10.3.x. In Jaguar 10.2.x and earlier any user could simply run the command:

nidump passwd . > passhashes

Then take that file which would have the password hashes for all users of the machine and run something like John the Ripper on it. Most likely one would transfer the file to another machine and run the password cracking program there. It might take a long time (days?) before one gets a password... but when I ran it on the passwd dump from one of our Xserves I got the admin password in 20 minutes.