Best of Tech Support

I received Linux from my computer class. I use Partition Magic, but I forgot the logon name I used during the class. How do I get back in?

—Santos Gonzales, sansan78228@yahoo.com

Assuming you boot with LILO, you can use some trickery to get in. When it boots, type the name of your boot image (you may press tab to get a list of images in case you forgot those) and append the string init=/bin/bash. For example, LILO: linux init=/bin/bash. Now edit the file /etc/shadow and change the line containing the word root. You want to remove all the characters between the first and second colons. Save the file. Then press Ctrl-Alt-Del to reboot. Log in as root (no password) and immediately set a password with the passwd command.

—Ben Ford, ben@kalifornia.com

I recently finished installing Red Hat 7.2, and I have a separate Windows 98 PC connected to a Cox@home cable modem. I want to move the connection to the Linux box and use it as a router, firewall and, if possible, a DHCP server. The reason for the DHCP is because I want to learn how to set it up, and make it work. If you could give me the first step, or the steps in order of their priority, I would greatly appreciate it.

—Mike Dickson, mjd42970@cox.net

First, set up your firewall. You need to set up both router protection rules and IP masquerading rules (for your Windows 98 boxes). You might want to use a GUI-based tool to start out, but you will grow out of it. Red Hat's GUI is called firewall-config. Second, set up the DHCP server. There is a DHCP mini-HOWTO at www.tldp.org/HOWTO/mini/DHCP/index.html. That's about it for a router. You can do other cool things, such as setting up your own mail server and web server, but this is a good first challenge. Overall, this project seems to be something you WANT to do, as a challenge. If this is not the case, I would recommend highly LRP out of the box or a Linksys box.

—Christopher Wingert, cwingert@qualcomm.com