Good lord. Name the number of things that could have gone wrong today, then add five or so for the sake of: reality.
Dell prefab machine went down, so it needs a replacement. The only sane replacement system has a BIOS password which I don’t know, and a root password I also don’t know. Only solution: use a root SSH key to access the system on a particular network (static hostname) in order to make required changes. Boot bare, non-complete system with old, functioning IDE disk, since all other systems are SATA only, in order to find configuration details, including YP, LDAP, NFS, etc. settings. Make appropriate changes on new system, and move back to a new static IP. Find extra USB keyboard, since new machine has no PS/2 ports and the only PS/2 to USB adapter on hand wasn’t functional. Take deep breath; because there was actually a lot more to the situation than the above, though it wouldn’t be good to put those parts on the Internets.
I’m impressed with myself that I got this all sorted out in less than 3 hours.. but good lord did it take some patience and innovative thinking.
Flip the jumper, chroot or nuke from orbit. Impressed by three hours though.
Hmm, I hadn’t even thought of looking for a jumper; good call. It’s a tightly packed Dell system, so that may not be even on that board, but I didn’t even think to look.
Grub also was password protected, and the BIOS boot options required a password to boot from any media other than the primary disk, so it was locked down pretty tightly. It did work out in the end, but I earned my wages for the day :)