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[Jason Parker-Burlingham]

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Greg Black <gjb at gbch.net> writes:

> On 2003-06-09, Jason Parker-Burlingham wrote:
>> Some mistakes, like deleting /etc (I did that once) aren't really
>> recoverable.
>
> In the past, SysV systems were particularly vulnerable to fat
> fingering the /etc/inittab file and it was often pretty much a
> case of booting from other media if you made too much of a mess
> there.  Is Linux still vulnerable in the same way?

Nope.  It's possible to pass the kernel the "init=/bin/sh" parameter
at boot time.  In a number of ways it's equivalent to single-user
mode; root simply has to be careful to sync and unmount disks before
rebooting when the problem is fixed.

However I'm not aware of any fix if you've completely nuked
/etc/passwd and /etc/group other than booting from other media, since
calls like getpwent(3) obviously start failing.
-- 
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                                 http://www.panix.com/~jasonp

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