Having broken my iPod, I decided to change the root password from the default of 'alpine' to something more sensible. I logged in and changed the root password using the passwd command. More fool me, apparently as the springboard kept restarting on me.
I still had ssh access (and root login worked). I made sure that the user/group listings were set to 0 for the mobile user in both the passwd and master.passwd files. Then I made sure that all the entries in passwd had an asterisk for the password and the entry in the master.passwd file contained the output from perl -e 'print crypt("yournewpassword", "/s"), "\n"'. All is good again! I think...
Update: later, things were still not working properly so I restored and just manually put in the entry for the account rather than trying to convince it to work. Oh well, practice makes imperfect I suppose.
I still had ssh access (and root login worked). I made sure that the user/group listings were set to 0 for the mobile user in both the passwd and master.passwd files. Then I made sure that all the entries in passwd had an asterisk for the password and the entry in the master.passwd file contained the output from perl -e 'print crypt("yournewpassword", "/s"), "\n"'. All is good again! I think...
Update: later, things were still not working properly so I restored and just manually put in the entry for the account rather than trying to convince it to work. Oh well, practice makes imperfect I suppose.
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