In article <200205211853.OAA21327@clayton.cs.monmouth.edu>,
R. Clayton <rclayton@monmouth.edu> wrote:
>Finally following the helpful recommendation that appears every time I log in
>as root, I disabled the root account by setting the shell to /sbin/nologin
>(which seemed to be the popular way to disable accounts in /etc/passwd).  Not
>long after, I discovered this is not the correct way to disable the root
>account, which leads me to my two questions:
>
> 1 How can Irecover the root login-shell short of re-installing (which I could
>   do but prefer to avoid)?  Some sort of crafty reboot into single-user mode,
>   perhaps?  This is netbsd sparc 1.5.2 generic.

boot -s

> 2 What is the proper way to disable the root account?

leave it alone :-) Seriously, you probably want root to be able to login
at least on the console. If you really don't want that, then '*' the password
field.

christos