Friday, January 26, 2007

How to Enable the root account on Mac OS X

We may, at some point of time, find a reason to enable the root account on our Mac. Well, we seldom need to log in as root. But still it is good to have total control on what does belong to us. To enable the root account, launch NetInfo Manager (Application -> Utilities -> NetInfo Manager) and authenticate yourself by clicking the lock icon at the bottom-left and entering your password. Select Security -> Enable Root User from the menu bar. If this is the first time you've done this, you'll be warned that the root password is currently blank and therefore you will be prompted to set one. Once you set the password for root user, click on the lock icon again to disallow any further changes, and close NetInfo Manager. The root account is now active. By following the same step you can also disable the root account.

Logging in as Root
During the initial logging process, we can log in as root just as we would log in as any other user. The only difference is that root won't appear in the list of users and their associated cute icons. Click on Other, enter root as the Name, and enter the password we assigned to the root account as Password.

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