Hello,

It was recommended to me by a colleague to set a grub password to further harden one of my systems. I don't think this is necessary as if you have physical access to the system you can just use a live cd to get into the system. Is there any reason to set a grub password that you may have come across?

You can set the BIOS to only boot from HDD, then put a password on the BIOS, then put a password on GRUB. This is helpful in a shared rack, where no one is likely to actually tamper with your box, because that would be obvious, but they might 'accidentally' plug their crash cart into your server,.. and if you don't have it properly locked down then you are hosed.

I actually think just setting a bios boot password is better than both ideas. You can still get around grub with bios locked to HDD (remove the HDD). However. If you set a bios boot password, your bios will refuse to boot anything unless it's provided with the password. There are bios settings for this. Set a user password and enable password on boot - done! I do this with all computers of mine (except standalone servers which restart on their own). Yes, the password is usually a max of 8 characters, but that is better still than just a grub password.

The system in question is a server. I wouldn't put a bios boot password on a server. Thanks for the info, though.

The CMOS password and Grub password is good enough for 'minor tampering' as i described above. If someone has full unimpeded access to your server then all bets are off.

I agree with YankeePride13 there. I couldn't bring myself to have a password blocking a reboot, especially on a remote server.

Right. I wouldn't recommend bios passwords on servers. I was unaware that is what you were asking about.