Disable Ctrl + ALT + Del restart

Hitting CTRL-ALT-DELETE on most Linux distributions will start the soft reboot process. Normally I like to disable this (at least on production systems) because someone might make a mistake and reboot the system. Also what I don’t like about this shortcut is that you don’t need to be logged in (no user/password needed – but only console access) to reboot the system.

01. Login as root

02. Edit the following system file (inittab)

03. To locate the system file
[root@daddylinux~]#whereis inittab

04. To find out the file type
[root@daddylinux~]#file /etc/inittab
05. To edit the text editor
[root@daddylinux~]#nano /etc/inittab

06. Comment this line (insert # mark)
#ca::ctrlaltdel:/sbin/shutdown –ts –r now

07. Save this file
Ctrl + O

08. Exit the file
Ctrl + X

09. Reload the inittab file in to memory again
[root@daddylinux~]#init q
or otherwise we have to restart the system

1 comment:

  1. This is out of date. CentOS 6.3 for example uses the /etc/control-alt-delete.conf file to control CTRL-ALT-DEL key sequence response.

    ReplyDelete