On 20 December 2010 15:17, Gordon Burgess-Parker <[email protected]> wrote: > On 20/12/10 15:08, Simon Greenwood wrote: > > The issue with Windows is that there is a database at the core of the > authentication mechanism, and this database can get damaged. Unix and Linux > are essentially based on flat files which can be edited with the correct > permissions. It is possible to damage /etc/passwd and/or /etc/shadow in such > a way as to cause authentication failure, and also to corrupt your user > space in such a way as to damage user configuration files, but it's also a > lot easier to recover them. > > s/ > > Ah. That makes things a bit clearer. Are there any "Howtos" as to how a > (relative) newbie can recover from these sorts of damage? >
If it was a common problem I'm sure there would be :) To be honest the answer is just to make backups, and that's something you should do regardless of the OS you use. Then just restore any damaged files from backups. I don't know about anyone else on this list, but I've never seen such corruption as we're discussing. Sure it can happen in theory, e.g. I could open the system file up in my text editor (if I have root access) and write some gibberish there. Otherwise I'm not sure how it would happen - poorly coded software running as root could do it, but I've never encountered such software that would write to e.g. /etc/passwd. Regards, Matthew -- [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
