The thread with a similar name reminds me of this story. My little
company did a lot of special work for IBM (Federal Sector) from putting
a second network card into Secure XENIX to porting the 370/PS2 AIX to
two i860 cards.
Occassionally, we’d get random other IBM hardware dropped on us. One
day an RS/6000 showed up. The problem was that they didn’t give us any
indication what the logins were (let alone the root password). Being
the long time security “investigator” that I was I started poking around
at the thing while waiting for IBM to call me back. The thing had a
key switch that switched you from power OFF to NORMAL ot a WRENCH icon
(maintenance mode). So I powered it up in the wrench mode. The
thing booted up Unix but rather than a shell gave some maintenance
program. I poked around at the options hoping for something that
would be useful for me without luck. One option was to view the
documentation so I brought that up and it displayed some text. The
neat thing (for me) was that it used ‘more’ to paginate it. Sure
enough, when I got to the end of the first page, I could just hit ! at
the prompt and get a root shell. It was then pretty easy to get the
machine set up to our liking.
-Ron