From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Oct 29 20:44:37 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from hera.webcom.com (hera.webcom.com [209.1.28.42]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 283CB14D4E for ; Fri, 29 Oct 1999 20:44:31 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from graeme@echidna.com) Received: from eresh.webcom.com (eresh.webcom.com [209.1.28.49]) by hera.webcom.com (8.9.1/8.9.1) with SMTP id UAA25775; Fri, 29 Oct 1999 20:44:31 -0700 Received: from [204.143.69.33] by inanna.webcom.com (WebCom SMTP 1.2.1) with SMTP id 58217967; Fri Oct 29 20:38 PDT 1999 Message-Id: <381A93BC.59BE@echidna.com> Date: Fri, 29 Oct 1999 23:44:12 -0700 From: Graeme Tait Organization: Echidna X-Mailer: Mozilla 2.02 (Win16; I) Mime-Version: 1.0 To: "Jason C. Wells" Cc: J McKitrick , freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: stupid root/toor question... References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Jason C. Wells wrote: > > On Fri, 29 Oct 1999, J McKitrick wrote: > > >Looks like root IS toor. > >But why was everyone saying to use a different shell in toor and save sh > >for root in the event of problems? > > Now for the gory details. > > Bash is built with the use of shared libraries. The libraries are in > /usr/lib. Suppose /usr has a problem. You cannot mount /usr. You cannot > use bash. If root tries to use bash but bash will not work, then root > cannot login. Poof, you are locked out. Not so! This might be a problem in other Unixes, but in FreeBSD, you can always boot into single user mode, where sh is the default shell. In fact, without /usr (and such things as getty, named, and inetd), you will have little choice but to run in single user mode. (I'm not sure, but I believe that the system may automatically boot to single user mode if /usr fails fsck.) To manually fsck a damaged /usr, you would likewise have to enter single user mode. -- Graeme Tait - Echidna To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message