A work colleague was reading a blog and in one of the comments was a statement saying that if you append

init=/bin/bash

to the grub boot line e.g.

linux /vmlinuz-3.2.0-2-amd64 root=UUID=26585ddb-7dde-4a7e-b2c7-e32330bb4cc8 ro splash quiet init=/bin/bash

you end up ia a shell with root privileges.

So we had go at it and it works. We even tried booting with a USB tick in place to see if you could copy stuff to it and you can.

The question that arose was what about network access? Do you have it? i.e. is there a tcp/ip stack running and if not how would you load one etc?

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Colin Fee
tfeccles@gmail.com