CentOS System Administration Essentials

Protecting the GRUB menu with passwords

Now I can imagine that all of this talk to gain root access from the physical server can be quite alarming; the truth is that it really shouldn't be, as securing physical access to the server is normally not difficult or onerous. However, where there is a desire or need to take the security further, it can easily be implemented through GRUB passwords. Any password settings will normally be added to the global section that precedes any stanza. Firstly, let's review some of the GRUB global options before setting some passwords.

On visiting the /boot/grub/menu.lst file on CentOS, we will see that the first lines are commented out and generated by the installer anaconda, and that the file is named as grub.conf ...