empirelinux.org

root login - fixing fedora 11

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 03:16:38 -0500

Its sad to see that the fedora distro has followed ubuntu in disabling the root login. I'm sure that some idiot has passed himself off as a security expert by comming up with the idea. If your the kind of admin who babysits an email server and plays freecell all day, then you probably should not log in as root .... ever .... For those of us who actually work in system administration and 90% of everything we do requires root access, logging in as root is a necessary evil.

The restrictions for root login are handled by PAM so the fix is pretty straight forward. You will need to edit one or more of the following files depending on your auth settings

/etc/pam.d/gdm

/etc/pam.d/gdm-password

/etc/pam.d/gdm-fingerprint

Edit each file and remove or comment out the line that reads:

auth required pam_succeed_if.so user != root quiet

That should do it. And of course, backup your files before you change them etc.. etc.. If you don't know basic precautionary procedures you shouldn't be messing with the root account and you deserve what you get

ssh - configuring passwordless logins

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 05:15:26 -0500

This is a quick reference for setting up public keys in ssh so you don't have to constantly type your password in front of prying eyes and hungry keyloggers.

Step 1:

Create a key pair if you dont already have one. Most ssh clients should now support RSA keys which will be located in ~/.ssh/id_rsa and ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

The command to create a new key pair is: ssh-keygen -t rsa just accept the defaults and leave the passphrase blank since were setting up passwordless access.

Step 2:

Copy your key to the remote system ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub user@othersystem

Step 3:

Test it ssh user@othersystem and it should connect you without prompting for a password.

If it doesn't work then check your ssh config file /etc/sshd/ssh_config and be sure that you have both RSAAuthentication and PubkeyAuthentication set to yes

Welcome to empirelinux.org

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 21:43:30 -0500

Welcome to the siliconempire linux projects page, also know as empirelinux or empire tools. This site is a repository of tools, scripts, wisdom, and current projects collected from veteran administrators over the years. We are not currently producing a distro, but that is a possibility in the near future. There have been two or three distros in the past that have gone by the name empirelinux. They are not affiliated with us and to my knowledge all have been discontinued.