Re: Full documentation for GRUB2

[kgrbf]

On Thu, 31 Mar 2011 04:39:37 -0400
Isaac Dupree <address@hidden> wrote:

> On 03/30/11 21:15, Leslie Rhorer wrote:
> >...
> >     If you ask me, that seems pretty dismissive of the idea the admin
> > should manually edit grub.cfg.  The fact the file is blindly and willfully
> > overwritten by configuration and upgrade utilities would seem to re-enforce
> > the notion it is not a terribly good idea.
> 
> FWIW, I keep my GRUB installation including grub.cfg on a separate 
> partition that is not listed in /etc/fstab for this very reason; I know 
> no distro I run will try to overwrite that!  It's annoyingly harder to 
> protect the MBR similarly; luckily distro installers tend to provide an 
> opt-out from installing their own bootloader, that I haven't *yet* 
> forgotten to select during the ten or so Linux installations I've done 
> on my laptop...

I've had countless painstaikingly tweaked setups totally hosed by braindead 
distro-install scripts and arrived at a similar conclusion more than 10 years 
ago, will certainly not change it either!  Part of the problem is that defaults 
are 'thought up' by halflife leftovers. A new user who may just have installed 
linux for the first time to accompany maybe three windows installations will on 
the first reboot face a grub menu list that's bent beyond recognition and s/he 
may need ten minutes to figure it out but the default timeout is like 8 
seconds! This kind of morbid stupidity rules and is not a grub issue.

The short of the long is that I set up on every single partition a /boot/user 
folder and place different copies of the menu file there with names that don't 
even resemble the stock name JUST to keep it all safe from system scripts! This 
also covers many possible failure scenarios so that if I run into trouble I can 
just point to any partition I can hit and redeploy boot code as I see fit in 
seconds. 
        
BTW the mbr protection you seek might be available if we can devise a cron that 
compares the mbr to what the admin sets up as the *copy to enforce* and sends 
grub to redeploy boot code if it's been tempered with outside of direct 
administrative authority.  Actually I'd like to do so with grub1 first for a 
spell ;-)