The idea is to mount on /etc a rw directory
* put in /ezxlocal/etc a copy of /etc
cp -dprf /etc /ezxlocal/etc
* replace current /etc with writeable copy of it
mount -o bind /ezxlocal/etc /etc
* edit the /etc/passwd at least for changing root password (you can even create your own users!). In order to get a fresh new password you can use on any linux host the apache htpasswd command. For example to generate a password for root copy the result of the following command into /etc/passwd file:
htpasswd -n root
In my /etc/passwd file I even changed the home directories for the users...