aidanfindlater.com

Let’s say you can’t log into your Mac, but you either have access to its hard drive (e.g. booted into FireWire target mode) or you’ve booted into single-user mode (by holding down Cmd-S, then typing “mount /” to enable read-write). On a normal Unix box you’d be able to edit the passwd and fstab files, but on Mac OS X it’s all stored in the NetInfo directory so my usual command-line tricks don’t work. There have to be some CLI utilites to manage the NetInfo directory, right?

Right. My search first turned up niutil, but that doesn’t work for this – it uses the NetInfo daemon. Single-user mode won’t work since the daemon’s not running, and it won’t work for an external drive because the daemon would be accessing the wrong NetInfo directory. So niutil’s out.

A little more searching discovered niutil’s lesser-known little brother, nicl. This puppy accesses the directory directly, no daemon. By using the command line option -raw /Volumes/External\ Drive/var/db/netinfo/local.nidb (or a variation thereof, if you’re in single-user mode), you can query and modify the NetInfo directory. Hooray.

One last note: from what I’ve seen, you can’t modify keys directly, you need to delete then create them. Kind of silly, and maybe I’m wrong, but that’s what I read.

Some NetInfo CLI examples: resetting an account password, creating a new user, enabling root login.