Giving physical access to your box may give the opportunity to change
your passwords and read all your files. The siplest would be booting from
a floppy disk and mounting the filesystems to read them. Even enabling
some password in the bios and disabling boot-on-floppy would not make it
sure enough since bios passwords are easy to bypass. The only *REAL* way
to prevent access would be to use encoded filesystems on your hard disks.
no one could read them without the logical key (although they could try
to hack it using brute force or whatever they want).
hope this is the answer you wanted [although you might have prefered it
to be the other way !!]
-----Message d'origine-----
De: Kelvin Teh [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Date: lundi 9 novembre 1998 17:48
�: Matthew Sachs
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Objet: Re: root password
Doesn't changing the password files require special permissions? If this
was possible then anyone can hack into Linux systems easily...
Please tell me if this is possible so that I can take some measures to
prevent abuse...My Linux box is shared by several users and I do not want
itchy users to delete my root passwords to put in their own.
Matthew Sachs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> on 11/09/98 01:53:41 PM
To: linux-newbie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
cc: (bcc: Kelvin Teh/SINGALAB)
Subject: Re: root password
At 11:04 AM 11/9/98 +0000, you wrote:
>what is the best way to retrieve root password if i forgot it.
>i'm using linux red hat 5.1
Boot to a linux floppy - with RedHat, make the boot.img and rescue.img
from
the files on the CD (by running rawrite.exe, located in the dosutils
directory, and specifying \images\boot.img and \images\rescue.img as the
images). Earlier versions of RedHat don't need a seperate rescue floppy,
but I believe 5.1 does. Boot to the boot floppy and follow the
instructions. I don't know what the rescue disk is like, but if it gives
you a linux prompt then type:
mount -t ext2 /dev/your_linux_partition /mnt
Use a text editor to edit /mnt/etc/passwd. It consists of several
colon-seperated fields. Look for the one beginning with root. One of
the
fields will look like garbadge - delete everything between the two colons
in that field. Save the file, exit, and reboot. Your root password is
now
blank.
--
Matthew Sachs
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
