I know nothing about HP UX (yeah, except SAM). That’s why, just now, when there’s a request to just make a trace route from an HPUX server to another server, I have to login and do execute the command. I couldn’t log in as my user id so i logged in as root instead from the console.

I check grep’d my account the walah! It was there! I reset the password, open an ssh terminal and tried to login. unsuccessful, that’s why i knew then that it is locked.

Here’s how to unlock a locked user account in HP UX in command line.

In HP-UX 11.xx if user account is locked, you can unlock the account by running SAM. But running SAM takes some time usually 2-3 minutes on heavily loaded HP-UX servers. You can unlock the locked user account from command line by running following command:

1. Login as root or use sudo from your account, if there is no sudo installed just use su – root :

$sudo su – *******

2. Run this command to unlock the locked HP-UX user account:

#/usr/lbin/modprpw –l –k johnm

Running modprpw will unlock the locked user account in HP-UX from command line.without running SAM

NOTE: modprpw is HP-UX command only and wouldn’t work in Solaris,AIX and any Linux servers

That info was ‘borrowed’ from here…. thanks!