Hi

The other day I was following some instructions I found and thought I would have a go at creating a new user in slack from the command line rather than kde's kuser. All goes well until I try to log in as root and the password wont accept!

When I looked at what I had been doing I realised I was following the instructions for adding a user using CLI, (whatever that is), maybe someone else can shed some light on why it did it!

I looked on the internet and found that if I boot with my slackware cd then press enter to get it to mount all the hdisks i am at a login prompt.

Instead of logging in I wrote linux init=/sbin/sh

instead of asking for my password it just gave me root permissions so I mounted my drive in /mnt/ and changed the /etc/shadow/ file to remove the encrypted password bit.

I was thinking maybe its possible to change the name of the shadow file so the intruder wouldnt know where to look and would have to look for the path to the new file name which would make it much harder. They would have access to the drive through the command line but would have to install another hd to copy all the stuff accross.

Now I know this is standard practice for lost root passwords but I dont really like it. How can I stop access to the pc like this - and still maybe have a disk or something should the worst happen?

Thanks Rob

There is one key step "Do not give people you don't trust physical access to your computer".

Other precausions:
1) Add a bios setup password
2) Make sure that the bios is only set to boot from your HDD
3) Create a bootloader password
4) Lock the computer case with a padlock if possible.

Thanks David it came as a bit of a suprise how easy it was. I have only been using linux for a few months and i found it easier than installing lmsensors. I presume a slack cd allows root access to most distros in this way?

Without the filesystem being loaded with the password files there are no security restrictions at all. Any OS that can read your filesystem can read the data.