Ughh, I'll go ahead and do it. Thanks for all the help!
hmm, I think su to root should definitely work. This is such a minor thing to have to re-install for. You sure you put the root password in correctly?
su should definitely work for you, like naq already said. You don't specify the error message you received but you confirmed earlier that the user you login as is allowed to use the command (else you wouldn't even get the wrong password message).
An idea: if you're using a non-English keyboard setup on your PC there may be issues with the layout, like the common z->y on English/German keyboards.
It has already been installed, could someone recommend a guide for security on centos 5? I was having a lot of problems with the other one anyways.
You will want to update to the latest kernel and packages so run "yum update" and restart the linux machine to boot into the new kernel. Afterwards, you want to setup a local user account and give the necessary sudo privileges. This is found in /etc/sudoers. Once that is setup, you should test your sudo abilities with your local user account. That way when you lock down the root account, you will have the ability to run root commands as yourself.
Once all that is done, I would change the root password is something crazy, disable root SSH logins through /etc/ssh/sshd_config but I wouldn't recommend usermod -L or passwd -l.
Another useful tool to install is blockhosts. This is just a python script that gets invoked when people try to login to your machine. It'll block IPs after X amount of tries and send an email to /var/spool/mail informing you of any blocked and watched IPs.
Ok, I'll try that out. I have another question, when I do "yum install vnstat" it says "nothing to do". I am trying to install vnstat, am I doing it correctly?
You can try typing yum search vnstat and see if there are RPM's in CentOS' repository. However, if it isn't there, you should search from the RPM on the net for your distro or just download the source packages for vnstat and compile them if necessary.
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