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From Authors, for About.com

am setting up an ftp account for you on my server. Email me your encrypted password." After you receive the encrypted password, you insert it into the appropriate field in /etc/shadow. Now, the user can log in, since she knows the password, but nobody else can.

To make the "floppy access" to my system a little bit more difficult, I considered running a computer without a floppy drive :-) Unfortunately, Linux CDs are bootable these days. I set up my boot sequence (in the BIOS setup) so that the system boots from the hard drive before floppy and CDROM are tried, and added an "administrative" password on changes to the BIOS settings. Still, I worry that these BIOS passwords are very easily crackable, or that one could remove the small battery that sustains the BIOS setting. One could also remove my harddrive and connect it to another computer for reading :-) . I am thinking about installing an "encrypted file system" which is now available on Linux, but considering all the trouble associated with it, perhaps I will settle on locking my room :-) . If all this sounds paranoid to you, it probably is--it just illustrates the point there is little computer security, even under Linux, if the potential cracker has a physical access to your hardware.

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