[p4] How to reset superuser's password?

[Viery Lee]

Luckily, replacing password text makes superuser login and I check perforce
it seems everything is OK. But I agree with journal/checkpoint the safer
solution.



On 9/1/06, Jeff Grills <jgrills at junctionpoint.com> wrote:
>
>
> IIRC, p4 user passwords get hashed to strings of the same length so it's
> probably not too big of a deal to replace one since offsets within the
> file
> won't change, but that would (as you mention) invalidate a checksum if one
> was present.  I don't think perforce makes the binary format public (I
> believe it's a modified Berkley DB, but that's just what I've heard), and
> they have no reason to ever make it public since they have the text
> checkpoints.  In fact, since the only supported way to change between
> architectures is by checkpointing and restoring, it's even possible that
> the
> DB format differs on different architectures, which very well might be
> true
> for 32bit vs 64bit platforms.  I suspect, though, that replacing the
> password text will just happen to work.  Importing a journal/checkpoint
> record to fix up the entry is a much safer solution.  In every place where
> I've worked that has used perforce, it's always been mission critical, so
> I
> personally would always chose the safer solution of the text record
> recovery.
>
> j
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com
> [mailto:perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com] On Behalf Of
> Ken.Williams at thomson.com
> Sent: Friday, September 01, 2006 1:44 PM
> To: vierycn at gmail.com; perforce-user at perforce.com
> Subject: Re: [p4] How to reset superuser's password?
>
> Whoa.  You edited the binary DB file with a text editor?  You're either
> very
> brave, very foolish, or you know something about the structure of that
> file
> that I don't.  To me that file is an opaque binary with no
> user-serviceable
> parts inside it.  In particular, it might have internal checksums,
> indices,
> and so on.  Is the format actually known so that this edit operation is
> known to be safe?
>
> -Ken
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com
> > [mailto:perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com] On Behalf Of Viery Lee
> > Sent: Thursday, August 31, 2006 9:14 PM
> > To: perforce-user at perforce.com
> > Subject: Re: [p4] How to reset superuser's password?
> >
> > Thanks Jeff.
> >
> > Now I resoved this problem.
> >
> > 1. On perforce server,  I find db.user file in perforce installed
> > directory.
> > 2. Open this file with text edit tool, such as editplus.
> > 3. I find serveral places of the superuser in this file,  and after
> > the username, there is a 32 bit encrypted password. Then replace the
> > last one with formal encrypted password.
> > 4. Finally I log into perforce.
> >
> > That's OK.
> >
> > Btw, if I use following command to change password: p4 passwd
> > username, then when I login to perforce, will show "Invalid password".
> > But when I change password in p4v, then login is OK.
> > I don't know the difference of this two way.
>
>