PGP universal Crash!

[chrisstyles]

Hi. We have a PGP universal 500 box that sits in our mail flow. On tuesday afternoon all mail stopped and I couldn't login to the PGP box. Though we could ping it. Tried to reboot it.

We reprogrammed exchange and our firewall to talk directly to get the mail flowing again. I now have my pgp box responding to a ping but not to a request for the web page. Also I can't login locally. Is this local login the same as the admin one on the web page?

Needless to say we recived no documentation on the system from our installers and this is the first time it's been rebooted. PGP support useless, they just say to reinstall the whole thing.

Any help / pointers much appreciated.

Chris Styles

NT4/2000 MCSE

 

[woefulhc]

Chris:

By default there is no usable account on the local box. (This is a deliberate design decision.) However, because PGPU is built on a hardened unix/linux OS, you should be able to root the box if you have access to the physical server. This link gives a good walk through that should allow you to login.

http://aplawrence.com/Linux/lostlinuxpassword.html

Now comes the hard part, because it will take command line skills to actually do anything at this point.

Do you have any idea why it crashed? Have you been getting the admin emails? How much disk space did they indicate was available in the last one you got? (Filling the disk is a great way to kill a *nix box.)

At a guess, you may need to reinstall. However, you may be able to extract and save the data you need if you can get logged in.

(A couple of things to keep in mind: It has been a few years since I worked with PGP Universal. Also, since that time, my *nix experience has been almost exclusively with FreeBSD and there are _differences_ between that and whatever Linux version is the current base for PGPU.)

--Paul