[TUHS] Maintenance mode on AIX

Arno Griffioen via TUHS tuhs at tuhs.org
Thu Jan 19 06:34:26 AEST 2023


On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 08:38:40AM -0800, Larry McVoy wrote:
> Someone once told me that if they had physical access to a Unix box, they
> would get root.  That has been true forever and it's even more true today,
> pull the root disk, mount it on Linux, drop your ssh keys in there or add
> a no password root or setuid a shell, whatever, if you can put your hands
> on it, you can get in.

Until a few years ago, I would definitely agree. Done that regularly
in the past. (and worked on lots of network gear too...)

However..

Nowadays with a little effort you can make a bootable Linux machine that 
uses either a passphrase or some external key/dongle/fingerprint/etc.
to unlock an encrypted root fs and additional filesystems.

If you don't have those credentials, then it's going to be pretty tricky to 
access as you simply can't even access any of the encrypted filesystems to 
start with.

Yes, you could probably get the initrd booted with a root shell and
then wipe the machine/disk to then do what you want, but the original
install is getting pretty hard to jump into with boot tricks these days.

								Bye, Arno.


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