# open terminal without login

## Mgiese

hi there,

i recently discovered that switching to terminal 9 (ctrl+alt+f9) opens a shell without login prompt."whoami" shows that i am root.

i am a bit scared now. have i been hacked ???... can someone point me in the direction to fix this?

thanks a lot

----------

## UberLord

Looks like it's the systemd debugging shell

https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/Debugging/

 *Quote:*   

> 
> 
> Tip: If you find yourself in a situation where you cannot use systemctl (e.g. when setting this up from a different booted system), you can enable the service manually:
> 
> cd $PATH_TO_YOUR_ROOT_FS/etc/systemd/system
> ...

 

While I'd love to claim it's a defect in systemd, I doubt that it's enabled by default - I'm sure our resident systemd lovers can verify this.

Or is there a USE flag such as debug which turns it on? If so, I sense a Slashdot front page news story!

----------

## Mgiese

thanks for the answer, my systemd looks like this :

```
Installed versions:  226-r2(16:33:36 12/27/15)(acl kdbus kmod lz4 pam policykit seccomp ssl -apparmor -audit -cryptsetup -curl -elfutils -gcrypt -gnuefi -http -idn -importd -lzma -nat -qrcode -selinux -sysv-utils -test -vanilla -xkb ABI_MIPS="-n32 -n64 -o32" ABI_PPC="-32 -64" ABI_S390="-32 -64" ABI_X86="32 64 -x32")
```

----------

## UberLord

And did you enable the debugging shell at all? Is it configured right now? If you remove the configuration does the shell vanish on reboot?

If the answer to any of those questions is no, I strongly suggest submitting a Gentoo bug here.

----------

## Mgiese

so far i didnt figure it all out.

i set 

```
 LogLevel=info CrashShell=no
```

 in /etc/systemd/system.conf, but the open shell didnt disappear. which keyword/useflag enables the debugging shell?

----------

## Mgiese

i think i found the problem, in gentoo wiki systemd article :

```
Or enable the debug-shell, that opens a terminal at tty9. This helps to debug services during the boot process.

root #systemctl enable debug-shell.service
```

so i can disable that, but if thats an unwanted behaviour of standrad systemd configuration, or if i set this myself during

 systemd switch, i cannot say, since it was 9 month ago when i did the switch

someone else should check that out please.

----------

## Mgiese

```
# systemctl 

  UNIT                                                            LOAD   ACTIVE SUB       DESCRIPTION

  debug-shell.service                                             loaded active running   Early root shell on /dev/tty9 FOR DEBUGGING ONLY

```

thanks for pointing me in the right direction !

----------

