how can i manage to boot up my linux box straight to the shell prompt WITHOUT any authentication, directly as the root user??

it might sound crazy, but im the only one in my universe, and i want to use this box as a node on a cluster...but please dont let that influence ur answer !!

thanx in advance!

this is very bad for security...... I remember that redhat does not allow me login as root automatically (which is logical).

I heard that some distros do that, one of them is lindows

As far as I know this isn't possible. Don't think there is any way around it without probably alot of hacking, etc.

Is there any reason you need this done? Is it that hard to type in a password or even just stayed logged in? This isn't very secure you know and I truly wouldn't recommend it.

Have you tried changing your runlevel to 1? That might work. Also, you can mess with your inittab so that instead of dumping you into a regualr terminal it would dump you right into bash after boot. Lemme know if you want more info on that.

well..lemme get this straight first....i want to do this because i have two pcs but only a single monitor.....i want to be able to access the other pc which does not have a monitor, with the one that does...so i want to configure it to boot up without any need for i/p, upto the bash prompt so that i can access the disks and all, and even form a cluster for experiments...
and security isnt an issue...both are private issues..and i really dont care if someone hacks into my system and looks at my girl`s pics..:-D..or messes it up, for that matter..but that dosent mean i welcome it! :-o

anyway, thanx for ur time and suggestions, any more are welcome....


PS...Guru, if i screw up my inittab, how do i recover from it? i dont suppose a boot floppy wud be of any help if the system refuses to boot after that?

If your innittab file get's messed, there is a thing called Zool Linux which boots from a floppy and allows you to fix things like that. Second of all, with what you want to do, you should be able to have it set itself up automatically at boot time. I don't really see why you would go through all the trouble to get just bash when you could just setup what you want automatically. Or maybe I am confused about exactly what you are trying todo...

Also you could get a KVM, 1 monitor, mouse and keyboard, many computers.

What makes you think you can't access the machine with no monitor and it has to autologin? If you have the correct services started like ssh or telnet, etc, you could access and login that way or maybe setup NFS or Samba to access the disks. But you don't need to have an autologin to access your computer at all.. that's just crazy...

acha? (thats Hindi for "really?")!

thanx mr trickykid, i dint know that, i suppose i dont have to go into all that trouble....

cud u all please take a look at my post in networking to see how my network is trying to impart me with a receeding hairline?

The shadows knows...

yah yah..and thanx for the nifty bit about Zool, guru, it looks real useful

I realize the point is moot now...but if you really did want to start your system without a login (for a test machine, or some other reason..) you could pass:
on the kernel command-line. This would drop you strait into bash (or whatever your default shell is...)

WARNING: this is really unsafe, as mentioned above...don't do this on your father's linux box...only on one that is NOT publically accessable, or an embedded project you may be working on or similar.

what-a-ya think ??? it is "winders with pc anywhere" ;-)
and the inittab
how bout cp inittab inittab.bak, before you mess with it ?

btw, the kvm setup works great...