booting with 'single' option

[Colin Watson]

On Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 06:03:08PM +0200, Kees-Jan Dijkzeul wrote:
> On 9/26/05, Duncan Lithgow <duncan at lithgow-schmidt.dk> wrote:
> > In order to rescue myself from a full /home dir I added 'single' to the
> > boot string. I'm a bit troubled by the fact that it let me in with
> > administrator privileges without asking for a password. Is that normal
> > behaviour?
[...]
> Come to think of it, the "normal" thing to do would be to ask for the root
> password, which isn't available in Ubuntu. So I guess it is normal after
> all.

Right; if you set a root password, Ubuntu's sulogin will ask you for it
rather than letting you straight in as root. However, pretty much any
Linux distribution will let you straight in as root if you boot with
'init=/bin/sh' on the kernel command line, so this Ubuntu change doesn't
make any difference to security.

As you say, you have to set a bootloader password or have some other
kind of physical security to stop people doing this kind of thing.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]