…or how I learned to start worrying and hack my own computer

Earlier today I managed to remove my self from the sudoers while trying to solve a problem I’m having with my iPod and Amarok. This meant I didn’t have root permissions on my own computer! Ack!

I did some poking around and quickly discovered a (convenient) security flaw in Ubuntu. Here’s the scoop.

1. Reboot


2. When presented with the Grub menu, select a working kernel and boot into Recovery Mode.


3. Eventually you are presented with a menu, one option is root shell.

So I choose the root shell option, was not prompted for a password, and there I was with root access to my own machine. There has to be a way to patch this up.