Recovery mode. Login as root without password

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 12:14:09 -0800,
  Joe Zeff <joe at zeff.us> wrote:
> On 02/16/2012 11:57 AM, Reindl Harald wrote:
> >becasue it is mandatory and logical as pre-condition
> >to disallow booting from external media
> 
> You know that, I know that and, I'd hope, everybody on this list
> knows that.  I can assure you, however, from almost a decade's
> experience doing tech support, that there are an awful lot of people
> out there who know just enough to block booting from external media
> but not enough to finish the job by setting a BIOS password.

Except that it's useful to be able to boot from external media. I prefer
to use encrypted disks. This protects against casual stuff and going much
farther gets a lot harder when you are assuming people have unsupervised
physical access to your machine.