Root on Michael’s Domain

suid and executing programs as root without need of typing the root password

Mon, 21 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

If you have executables (programs, scripts), that need root privileges to run (e.g. that mount something), you don’t need to type in the su password everytime.You can set the suid for that file and change its owner to root:chmod u+s filename chown root filename

Resetting the MySQL root password

Thu, 05 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

If you have forgotten your MySQL root password, you can reset it if you have physical access to the machine mysql is running on: Find the .pid file of the mysql process. It is either called mysql.pid or machinename.pid. Kill the mysql process. On my MacOS X server e.g. kill cat /usr/local/mysql-standard-4.0.16-apple-darwin6.6-powerpc/data/localhost.pid`` Restart the mysql server /usr/local/mysql-standard-4.0.16-apple-darwin6.6-powerpc/bin/mysqld_safe --skip-grant-tables & Set the new root password (replace newpassword with the new password!) /usr/local/mysql-standard-4.0.16-apple-darwin6.6-powerpc/bin/mysqladmin -u root flush-privileges password "newpassword" Done!

Ubuntu and root, su and sudo

Tue, 06 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

In (K)ubuntu, only sudo is allowed by default. To enable su, execute:sudo -s -HTo enable graphical root login, edit /etc/kde3/kdm/kdmrc:AllowRootLogin=true