toor – and why you should keep it

toor – and why you should keep it

This article talks about the toor login.

toor?  what’s that?

Well, I’m not surprised you’ve never heard of it.  I just did a search
on www.freebsd.org
and found only 1 reference to toor.  And even that was a side
issue..  toor is root in disguise.  It has all the power of root.  I
searched the mailing list archives for details on toor.  I found a few more
details.  It was originally intended to be used if the sysadmin forgot the root
password.  But now what you do is boot into single user mode and set the password
that way.  But I guess if you need to keep the machine up and running 24/7, then
dropping to single user mode is not an option.   In that regard, I think keeping toor
around is a good idea.

If, for some reason, the shell for root is broken, you can fix it
using toor.

Some people ask if they can remove it.  Of course you can.  But I recommend
keeping toor, for the above reasons.

But you can’t use toor by default

toor has no password to start with.  Which means you can’t login as toor. 
So what you must do to use toor is give toor a password when you are root.  This is a
pretty simple process:

passwd toor

Note that for security reasons, you can only login as toor or root from the console.
  Although this can be changed, I would advise against it.

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