Interesting that this failed in SuSE. I had worked on the RedHat distros for years. I think I'm going to give it a run on a lab machine on Monday morning just for fun.

Katja,

This isn't a security issue. Take a peek at single user mode in linux and it should be fairly obvious why this is the case. Well, other than what roswell has already provided, which I agree with 100%.

Also, this technique is all over the internet. Throw linux root password reset in google. My guess it that you'll have 100s of hits on the 2 techniques listed here.