Oh no I lost my linux username?!
It just literally happend to me. I was just going to rewew a certificate and I realised that I’d not accessed the server for a year! How cool is that, the server has been up for nearly a year. Anyway went to login, couldn’t remember my login name.
So by design this server is one of my Proxmox virtual machines (Proxmox is the most incredible VM manager). So every night it gets backed up.
I went to the backup and downloaded the file /etc/passwd for that server and there was my username – you can tell the ones for logging in because they have 1000 as the rights.
Does this make linux insecure?
Only if you have access to the drives or a copy of it.
What if I am not hosting on proxmox or I can’t get to the drive?
Hopefully you can boot up in some kind of rescue mode if hosting where you can access the server’s disk, alternatively you can boot to a live USB key and then get access that way.
Ofcourse if you encrypted the disk then…well…. you might be stuffed.