I've got an embedded device (it's a wifi camera) that I've managed to login on. I copied the passwd file and started john the ripper. It's taking quite some time. 

```
$ cat passwd
root:9so4MTVQCT0io:0:0:root:/root:/bin/sh

$ john passwd
Loaded 1 password hash (descrypt, traditional crypt(3) [DES 128/128 SSE2-16])
Press 'q' or Ctrl-C to abort, almost any other key for status
Warning: MaxLen = 13 is too large for the current hash type, reduced to 8

```

Since I have access to the system, and I can change the password, would it be helpful to john if I changed the password multiple times (copying the hash each time)? Picking passwords like, 'password', 'pass123', etc, might help john find the salt (?) and make it easier to know which salt to use for this one? Or am I misunderstanding the idea of salting passwords? (I get that ideally from a security standpoint, each password would be salted differently, but I'm not sure if this is. Is there a way to know?)

Any thoughts? Thanks!

*P.S. I posted this in unix.stackexch but I think this is a better place, so please forgive (or correct) this cross post.*