sudo user

Posted Oct 14, 2025 12:19 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
In reply to: sudo user by taladar
Parent article: Lucky 13: a look at Debian trixie

If you can't log in as root, then you have to fix a broken boot by booting from external rescue media, I guess. Which can be annoying if your machine is remote, but you have a KVM-over-IP box. So I too always set a root password on my machines.

sudo user

Posted Oct 16, 2025 8:24 UTC (Thu) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link]

It is not even just annoying, it also potentially makes it impossible to figure out what the problem is in the first place since most boot failures happen before logging to persistent media is enabled so you need to know what state the initrd based system is in at the time of failure to figure out what went wrong.