Blog Archives
how to find when the login password was last changed
Sometimes it can be useful to know when the user’s password was last changed. For example, you might want to enforce a policy of having users (or yourself!) change login passwords after a given period. Alternatively, if you or one of your users is experiencing login difficulties, you might want to check that the password hasn’t been changed unbeknownst to (or unremembered by) the user.
We can accomplish this from the command line (aka by using the Terminal.app) with the following one-liner (a raw text version is also available from my pastebin here):
echo; echo Password Last Changed:; u=$(dscl . list /Users | egrep -v '^_|daemon|nobody'); for i in $u; do printf \\n$i\\t; currentUser=$i;t=$(dscl . read /Users/"$currentUser" | grep -A1 passwordLastSetTime | grep real | awk -F'real>|</real' '{print $2}'); date -j -f %s "$t" 2> /dev/null; done
Note the odd entry belonging to user ‘dev’ in the screenshot: the 1970 date is the start of unix time, and its appearance here indicates that the password hasn’t been changed since time began!…or, more seriously, that this password hasn’t been changed since the user account was created.
Enjoy! 🙂
how to remove Lion Recovery disk
If you have reverted your mac to Snow Leopard from Lion, its important that you also remove the Recovery HD, as it can compromise the security of your Snow Leopard installation (for security issues with Lion, see here). Reverting to SL via Time Machine or restoring from a clone will leave the Recovery partition in place, meaning anyone can boot into it and reset your Snow Leopard passwords merely by restarting your mac while holding down the ‘option’ key.
To remove the Recovery disk follow this procedure:
1. Revert back to Snow Leopard using Time Machine or a clone.
2. Once you’re up and running and have confirmed everything is good, go to Terminal (Applications > Utilities > Terminal) and paste/type this command to confirm the presence of the Recovery HD:
diskutil list
then press ‘Return’. If you see a partition labelled something like this
Apple_Boot Recovery HD (see image above)
then you will need to continue with the rest of the procedure. If the Recovery HD is not listed here, you do not have the Recovery partition and need not worry further.
3. If you find the Recovery HD in the list, paste the following command into Terminal:
defaults write com.apple.DiskUtility DUDebugMenuEnabled 1
Press ‘Return’.
Now open Disk Utility (Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility). In the menubar at the top, choose Debug > ‘Show every partition’
On the left in the main Disk Utility window, you’ll be able to see ‘Recovery HD’ (it’ll be greyed out). You can click ‘Mount’ in the taskbar to make it active, and you can now delete it using control-click/right click – erase or by using the ‘erase’ tab in DU’s window.
If you want to confirm that the Recovery disk is no longer present, go back to Terminal and type the command from step 2.
Related posts:
how to secure your mac (OS X Lion)
applehelpwriter.com 