Re: rebooting (was Snooper watchers)

[rali () hri com (Reto Lichtensteiger)]

Back at the ranch, Karl Strickland scribed:

: > 
: >      The best thing to do is take the nit support out of the kernel and 
: >      remove /dev/nit.  Now someone would have to build a new kernel and 
: >      reboot the machine to replace the nit support.
: >      
: >      If you are overly concerned about this, you can set the boot device 
: >      (in the rom monitor on a sparc) to boot off of some other disk, one 
: >      that is not bootable or not there.  Then a reboot/fastboot/shutdown 
: >      -r/etc will not be able to automatically bring the system up.  I don't 
: >      believe that you can specify boot devices from a unix reboot type 
: >      command.
: 
: is it not possible for a hacker to set his own boot device before performing
: his reboot, and then reset it back to whatever-it-was later?  ie by messing
: with /dev/openprom or whatever its called

% uname -a
SunOS sextant 4.1.4 1 sun4m

man 8 reboot:

   SYNOPSIS
        /usr/etc/reboot [ -dnq ] [ boot arguments ]

   Boot Arguments
        If a boot argument string is given, it is passed to the boot
        command  in  the PROM monitor.  The string must be quoted if
        it contains spaces or other characters that could be  inter-
        preted  by  the  shell.   If the first character of the boot
        argument string is a minus sign `-' the string must be  pre-
        ceded by an option terminator string `--'

It's certainly possible to reboot whatever device you can feed to reboot,
never mind trying to reset the eeprom values.

-Reto-
-- 
R A Lichtensteiger      rali () hri com
System Administrator    Horizon Research Inc    (617) 466-8304
                        Waltham MA 02154
        http://www.hri.com/HRI/People/rali.html

I use Solaris because someone told me it was admirable to work with the
handicapped ...