Default Admin/Netgear1 Logon Doesnt Work (#8463338)

Hi,

We had a problem with similar symptoms (no passwords accepted, even after OS Reinstall), although ours was with a NAS that had been in-use for six months.

Here's what we think happened in our case:

1. The firmware partition filled-up with log files

2. With diminishing space, Samba was unable to create lock files, leading to more error logs. The lack of space prevented some services from even starting, blocking us out one protocol at a time

3. Inability to lock files prevented files from being opened correctly, degrading performance

4. Attempting to recover the OS included re-creating the password file, which failed due to insufficient space - we were left without ANY passwords for root or admin

5. The NAS was then running, but would not accept any log-ins

We resolved the problem by:

1. We removed the drives from the NAS and put them into a PC

2. We booted the PC off of a Debian boot disk

3. We mounted the RAID using mdadm - this gave us access to the root file system, but not our data

4. We used chroot to access the local file system, and used pwconv to recreate a shadow file (passwords) from our passwd file (user list)

5. We set new passwords for root and admin using passwd

6. We unmounted the drives, put them back in the NAS, and started it back up

We're currently copying-out our latest data, and intend to do a full OS reinstall to make sure there's no other corrupted/empty files waiting to bite us.

I hope that helps anyone else who encounters this problem!