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my friend is hosting a Minecraft Server for me. I wanted to update some plugins, I SSH into the server. But then I relieved I forgot the root password. I asked my friend, and he forgot too! I was wondering how I could reset it remotely.

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    Do you guys have sudo permissions? If so use sudo passwd root. – troylatroy Feb 21 '17 at 21:37
  • Root is the only account on there –  Feb 21 '17 at 21:38
  • Please [edit] the output of lsb_release on the Ubuntu server with only the root account into your question. thank you for helping us help you! – Elder Geek Feb 21 '17 at 21:41
  • @ElderGeek If they could log in to the server with only that root account, they wouldn't have forgotten their password and wouldn't have a problem... – Byte Commander Feb 21 '17 at 21:42
  • @ByteCommander that's true. I'm trying to parse the concept of having a server with only a root account period. Color me skeptical. – Elder Geek Feb 21 '17 at 21:47
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    Unless you have some sort of BMC/VSP/Console ports to that server, you will have to make password changes physically on the server. If you could change it remotely that would be a security violation and anybody could get right into your server at any time. – Terrance Feb 21 '17 at 21:48

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Of course you can fortunately not log in remotely to a server without knowing the account password (or having SSH-keys set up).

Just imagine what happened if there was a way to bypass authentication on any arbitrary server connected to the internet and log in as root (or admin account with sudo permissions, doesn't matter). Looking at the issue this way makes it clear that such a thing may not be possible.

You can only reset a forgotten root password if you have physical access, which gives you the option to boot the system in recovery mode and drop to a root shell, as described in How do I reset a lost administrative password?

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Byte Commander
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