Recover Root Password on FC 11 and Missing GRUB Screen

[Tim]

On Tue, 2010-01-05 at 00:15 -0800, Hosea Phiri wrote:
> I have a client who lost root password for his machine running FC 11.
> I made an attempt to recover password by booting in single mode. I am
> familiar with editing the GRUB boot menu and appending "linux single"
> to make the server boot in sigle mode.
>  
> My surprise, the machines boots differently. I noticed one major thing
> that looked different from other versions of Fedora I have used
> before. It does not bring up the Grub menu. It does not even show the
> services startup. It goes straight into login prompt bypassing all
> other stages which I guess run from background.
> 
That is normal.

And if you don't want unauthorised people to be able to do the same
thing, you need to take some steps to make it difficult:

Set the BIOS so it will only boot from the hard drive, ignoring
floppies, CD-ROMs, and drives plugged into USB ports.

Password protect the BIOS so nobody can change the above options.

Password protect the GRUB menu, so you cannot change boot options
without typing in a password.  All you can do is pick from the preset
entries for which kernel to boot from.

With those steps someone has to crack your password, or remove the hard
drive from the computer.  That's not something that they could easily do
without getting noticed.

As well as being a measure of protection against malicious abuse, it's
also good protection against stupid uses of computers by authorised
people.



-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

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