RE: [LUG] Re-Install ??

["Jon Still" <jon at termisoc.org>]

>
> Deleting /etc/passwd unrecoverable - I doubt it - isn't on any other
> Unix I've used unless you deliberately lock them down.

If you've got local console access, you can recover from most things.  Best way
of doing this is:

linux single

at the lilo prompt, assuming you are loading an image called "linux".  If the
system is broken to such an extent that even that doesn't work, then try:

linux init=/bin/sh

This skips all the usual init stuff and just gives a shell, with the root
partition mounted read only.  You then have to bring everything else up manually
and fix whatever it was that is causing you to do this.

As an aside, on production servers it's worth taking the time to lock down both
the BIOS and lilo prompts.  Under lilo this is done using the password= and
restricted keywords in lilo.conf.  These will prevent people from passing
options to lilo like those above.  Likewise, set a bios password so people can't
boot off floppy (although granted, bypassing bios passwords is typically
trivial).

J.

--
Jon Still                               E-mail: jon at termisoc.org
System Administrator                    Web:    http://www.termisoc.org/~jon/
TermiSoc - UPSU Computing Society       Tel:    +44 (0)7977 066087

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