Re: passwords and commandline options

[George Shin <gshin@ix.netcom.com>]

At 05:05 PM 6/25/97 -0700, you wrote:
>... Etherboot uses a rather 
>simple extension to the BOOTP format for passing command line
>parameters. This is an excerpt from the README.VendorTags file:
>
>          passwd  - MD5 message digest of the password.  If this entry
>
Does anyone know how to use "md5sum" from the command line using stdin
as the input rather than giving it a filename?  The manpage (actually
Textinfo on md5sum) states that omitting filename or using '-' will
allow stdin as the input for "md5sum" to encrypt.  However, i'm not sure
how to escape out of the stdin once i'm done entering in the text.  Tried
Ctrl-C or Ctrl-Z but didn't work.  There must be a way to escape out so
that "md5sum" would show me the encrypted string.  If i create a file
with content being say "Penguin" and run "md5sum Penguin", i do get back
a finger print which by the way is different from the sample bootptab
in,

http://www.slug.org.au/etherboot/doc/html/vendortags.html

>          cmdline - the contents of this  entry is appended to the end
>                    of the command line that gets passed to the loaded
>                    image.  This  feature   is unaffected  by the  "p"...
>
Hmmm, i'm not really clear here as to this "cmdline" parameter being
appended to the end of the "another" command line that gets passed to
the loaded image.  Are there "two" command line parameters?  In LILO
i know that you can pass arguments to kernel and one such argument
i use often is "mount root=/dev/sda1".  Is this the sort of argument
you can include in "cmdline" field?

>
>If you need a more detailed description of this feature, feel free to
>ask. As general rule, "etherboot"'s behavior is modelled to copy the
>behavior that LILO exhibits.
>
>Markus
>
I'm trying to figure out how one would generate a single Linux boot
image file that can allow both X and non-X boot?  Do i need to rebuild
the Linux kernel?  I tried to do something similar with LILO also but
just couldn't figure out how.  I want to have an option to start
Linux at run-level 3 (non-X) and run-level 5 (xdm).  Any pointer to
proper HOWTO or etc would be appreciated.

Thank you very much,

-gshin