The debian-private mailing list leak, part 1. Volunteers have complained about Blackmail. Lynchings. Character assassination. Defamation. Cyberbullying. Volunteers who gave many years of their lives are picked out at random for cruel social experiments. The former DPL's girlfriend Molly de Blanc is given volunteers to experiment on for her crazy talks. These volunteers never consented to be used like lab rats. We don't either. debian-private can no longer be a safe space for the cabal. Let these monsters have nowhere to hide. Volunteers are not disposable. We stand with the victims.

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Re: Getting root on Linux



Philip Hands <phil@hands.com> writes:

> > A better solution would be to let the postinst ask if restricted&password
> > are needed then ask for a password. And check if the password is entered
> > correctly and not empty!
> 
> This is all pretty redundant unless you remove the floppy drive.  Especially 
> since by default mbr allows you to boot from floppy, even if you set the bios 
> to boot from the hard disk.

In the situation here, this is a given :-)

Yes, the BIOS on these computers has an option to disable floppy boot
ability.  This ability has been disabled and the BIOS has been
password protected and the case has been padlocked shut, so there is
no way they can boot from the floppy.

(though what is this about the MBR letting them boot from the floppy??)

> 
> I don't want to see any postinst questions that are not absolutely necessary, 
> and since I would guess that the vast majority of our users install mbr and 
> don't remove the floppy, this seems to be a counter productive question to 
> have in a postinst.

I'd suggest an option at install time.  Having known ways to get root
just by spending a couple of minutes at the keyboard is not good.
Somebody could walk out of their office or something -- it is not just
when operating public machines like in labs that this could be an issue.

-- 
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