Fedora safe/recovery mode

[Brian Wheeler]

On Sun, 2007-03-04 at 10:01 -0500, Chuck Anderson wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 04, 2007 at 09:45:22AM -0500, Chuck Anderson wrote:
> > On Sun, Mar 04, 2007 at 03:00:05PM +0100, Enrico Scholz wrote:
> > > > tested this in fedora for some months, but last I checked, runlevel 1
> > > > dropped the user directly in a root shell.
> > > >
> > > > Runlevel 3 is at least as safe as runlevel 5 and could be used with no
> > > > security implications.
> > > 
> > > As long as Grub and the BIOS are not protected with a password by
> > > default, we do not need to discuss this....
> > 
> > Does grub have a "secure" flag you can put in a stanza to require grub 
> > to prompt for a password?  That would solve the security concern.
> 
> Answering myself:
> 
>  -- Command: lock
>      Prevent normal users from executing arbitrary menu entries. You
>      must use the command `password' if you really want this command to
>      be useful (*note password::).
> 
>      This command is used in a menu, as shown in this example:
> 
>           title This entry is too dangerous to be executed by normal users
>           lock
>           root (hd0,a)
>           kernel /no-security-os
> 
>      See also *Note Security::.
> 
> 
> under *Note Security*:
> 
>    Also, you can specify an optional argument to `password'. See this 
> example:
> 
>      password PASSWORD /boot/grub/menu-admin.lst
> 
>    In this case, GRUB will load `/boot/grub/menu-admin.lst' as a
> configuration file when you enter the valid password.
> 

What's the chances of a user remembering this password if they've
forgotten the root password?  If its set to a default then everyone
knows it anyway and there's no used to having it in the first place...

The idea (elsewhere in this thread) of having a recovery root (which
would probably be a busybox based system) on /boot is a good one, but it
shouldn't have a password either, just a really "stern" warning not to
do something stupid like, say, remove shared libraries.

Brian