HOW TO: Enabling root on a new server?

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Thu, Jul 12, 2007 at 11:06:07PM -0400, Michael Williams wrote:
>  I recently purchased a co-located server from Cedant and need to enable the 
>  root user.  It's running FreeBSD 6.1.  Currently there appears to be no root 
>  user enabled on the server.  I can't even "su" to root.  I've tried using 
>  "pw" to add my user to "wheel" but I receive a warning informing me that I 
>  must be root to even do such a thing.  You can see my quandary.  Please 
>  advise.

FreeBSD, out-of-the-box, definitely includes user "root", and there is
no password (unless during the installation you choose to set one).

This sounds like a question you should be talking to Cedant/your
provider about.  What you purchased may not be a real co-located box
that's personally dedicated to you -- it may be something shared with
other people, and something that Cedant maintains.  This is purely
speculative on my part, because I know nothing about their services.
But this really does sound like something specific to their servers.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                    jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                           http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                      Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.                  PGP: 4BD6C0CB |