I forgot the root password of my NAS, which is running Debian. After some Googling I found an easy way to reset it.

My HP N40L kicked the bucket, and of course it was just past warranty. The case is some bizarre proprietary thing too, so there’s no repairing it. Nothing to do but sigh at the 10 hard drives left behind. Figured I’d just build one myself. Bought an absurdly cheap H61 board off eBay, an equally cheap Celeron 1610, and a cheap industrial-style full tower — 400 yuan total. Along with the sketchy SSD and HBA card I already had, plus a leftover OC3 Red Sea cooler and a pile of random case fans, that was basically everything. I’ll skip the assembly. The industrial case gives you 10 drive bays and room for more. It POSTed on the first try, naturally — and of course after it booted I found two of the 10 drives were dead. That left four 500GB WD Blue drives and four 1TB Seagate 7200 drives.