MLUG: The Power Of The chroot Command

"In this article I will be discussing some of the features of the chroot command. As some of you might already know, chroot creates a type of jail if you like to call it that. It locks a part of a filesystem away from the rest.

But lets look at something a little more practical with this great command. An admin loses his documentation and his root password on a certain system. Admit it now, hasn't this happened to you at least once? Now instead of a complete reinstall we can use chroot to resolve the problem in about 5 minutes. This same method can be used, when lilo is misconfigured.

We will assume you are running Redhat or Mandrake and that you cannot remember your password, Things are starting to seem hopeless and now you can't seem to log in anymore. Here's what you do."

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