Last night I thought it would be a good idea to change the root password on my iPhone…

… Stop laughing. No seriously, stop. I can hear you from here…

Oh, how wrong I was. If you change the root password from the default “alpine” the iPhone gets stuck in an endless “Finder restart loop” and keeps reloading the “Edit Home Screen” over and over again. This renders the phone pretty much unusable. The good news is that the underlying BSD subsystem appears unaffected. I could still SSH into the phone through WiFi, copy files over SCP, etc. But even after changing back the root password it was still “rooted” - haha that was an awesome pun there. I crack me up.

All of this happened at 11:30pm and I was not about to stay up all night fixing the darned thing. I actually managed to get some sleep despite being very anxious that I had just manufactured one very shiny brick. But it was not to be. This morning I put the iPhone into “DFU” recovery mode manually by holding down the home and hold buttons together. Then restored 1.1.4 firmware through iTunes. Then ran ZiPhone and it came miraculously back to life!

But this is the best part, I plugged it back into iTunes and the contacts & music were just restored automagically. I had to redo settings like WiFi & email accounts, but that took all of 10 minutes.

That little rant aside, here’s the other stuff I did that *didn’t* break the iPhone:

Custom Ringtone

The ringtones are stored in /Library/Ringtones/ in MPEG-4 Audio format with .M4R extension. It’s a good idea to set correct permissions after uploading, with `chown root:admin` and `chmod 0664` or through a GUI SCP client, like Fugu or WinSCP.

Custom SMS Alert

The SMS sounds are stored in /System/Library/Audio/UISounds/ and named “sms-receivedX.caf” with X from 1-6. The audio format for .CAF extension is AIFF. These are just a renamed .AIFF file. Easiest way is to replace one of the existing files. Not sure about adding new ones, or changing the names that show up in the GUI. It’s probably in a .plist files somewhere, but I’m not game.

Other Information

Connect via SSH or SCP with username “root” and password “alpine”. DO NOT change the root password. Repeat, DO NOT.