On Fri, 4 Jul 2003, Nick wrote:

> On Thu, 3 Jul 2003 21:10:12 -0500 (CDT), Frederick Bruckman wrote:
>
> >On Fri, 4 Jul 2003, Nick Boyce wrote:
> >
> >> So in the end I rebooted from the NetBSD installation CD, exited the
> >> installer, mounted my root partition, and edited wscons.conf back to
> >> the default state again ... it was the quickest way out of this silly
> >> mess.
> >
> >The quickest way out would have been to hit "SPACE" when you saw the
> >boot prompt, boot to single user with "boot hd0a:netbsd -s", then run
> >"passwd" from the single-user shell.
>
> Ah .. but doesn't single-user mode demand the root password anyway
> (like Linuxen seem to these days) ?   [I'm not at the box to try at
> the moment]

Not by default. You can make it so, and set a password for the boot
prompt, but there's not much point unless you also lock the case and
chain down the computer.

> >If it's up and running, and you
> >don't want to cycle power, you can get the debugger prompt with
> >"CTL-ALT-ESC", type "kill 1", then "c", and again, "passwd" from the
> >single-user shell.
>
> Ooo ... that sound scary ... what's that doing ?  Killing init ?!?

You bet. Assuming you have physical possesion and access to the power
switch (or the breaker), it saves you the fsck.

Frederick