WebOS 1.3.1 and Auth Changes
Nov/16/2009 09:35 AM
I purchased my Palm Pre the morning it came out. Within a couple of days, people had already figured out how to gain root access to the underlying Linux operating system. I've setup access since that time (early June). Since that time, everything has worked great. Update after update, Palm has never tinkered with anything related to the SSH access. After I installed WebOS 1.3.1, all of a sudden I could no longer access my phone over SSH. Unlike all those iPhones that just got hacked because they had enabled root access with no password, I have direct root access over SSH disabled. I have a separate SSH user created, which is just security common sense. Unfortunately, it seems that Palm had updated the /etc/passwd file in the latest update which removed my SSH user. Had I left the system insecure, I could have still logged in with the root user, but I didn't. I don't recall how I initially enabled the root access, but I seem to recall that it required connecting the phone to my computer and it didn't work on Windows 7. So, that was going to require that I load up a virtual machine on my desktop and figure it out again. Instead, I was able to install the Terminal application from Preware and was able to get a root console that way. I don't know why Palm made this change, but I now see they also updated the hostname on the device for some reason. Before, the hostname was simply 'castle', which was the Pre's codename. Now the hostname shows as 'palm-webos-device'. Hopefully this is the last time Palm makes this change as I like having control over the phone.
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After owning my 3650 for a little while now, I have never been able to get the thing to sync with Outlook. I think the install of PC Suite must have been corrupted or something. I had uninstalled and re-installed numerous times (as seen in the Bluetooth fun posts), but that was to get the PC Suite to just see the phone. I didn't want to attempt another re-install just to get the sync to work as I figured another reinstall would probably do more harm than good.