SUSE Lesson 5 Manage Legacy Grub Bootloader

This week we are are 5 weeks into the schedule and we take a look at the GRUB boot-loader, or the Grand Unified Boot-loader. We also refer to this a “legacy GRUB”  to differentiate from GRUB 2 the new kid on the block.

Using openSUSE the configuration for this is /boot/grub/menu.lst. The boot-loader allows us to select the OS and any kernel options. We can add entries into the menu and, should we wish, delete entries. We will also look at securing the GRUB menu with a password, this way you can only select from menu items and not append additional kernel options. The risk of this is highlighted by booting with the init=/bin/bash; this gives us root access with need of a password. Adding the grub password and encrypting it with grub-md5-crypt will prevent this.