sudo is useful, though (IMHO) not really a full replacement for using the
root account. It can usefully save your ass in situtions like this,
however, and you'd have to su to root much less often. -J

On Tue, 21 May 2002, Christos Zoulas wrote:

> 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
>