I have installed Red Hat 7.2 as a workstation. I wanted to telnet this station so i installed the telnetserver. Now i can login as user but i cannot login as root. What do i have to do to login as root?

You cannot login as root from a telnet connection, you can login as a user, then run su to get a root shell. You have to physically be at the terminal to login as root. Damien.

Move or change the name on the file securetty in /etc

I know you specifically asked about telnet, so please pardon me if this post is unwanted, as you may have a good use/reason for wanting to telnet in to your machine. BUT... If you are telneting in to your machine from the outside world (work, holidays, road trips, whatever) anyone can "sniff the packets" and get your login/password, as well as a record of what you did while logged in. This is especially a dangerous situation if you are logging in as root. So, you might want to consider this suggestion. An alternative to telnet that provides all the same functionallity is SSH. SSH (Secure SHell) is an encrypted implimentation of telnet (along with lots of other great features). I believe that by default it is installed with RH7.0 (a quick check at Red Hats' website shows only 7.0, since you said 7.2 did you mean 6.2 or 7.0?) but not with 6.2. If you are using 6.2, you will have to download/build the package, but it is very easy (honest, the instructions contained in the INSTALL file are very thorough). You can download the openssh source gzipped tarball from the following: http://www.openssh.com It requires two additional libraries to be downloaded/made/installed, but they go pretty quickly (unless you're using a 486 - I did that for a client and it took a verrrrrry long time to build - if you are using one of those, go rent a couple of good movies first!) and the instructions for each of them are very thorough and readable as well. The last thing you need to remember to do (all this is explained in the INSTALL for openssh, but it's far enough down that sometimes people miss it) is move the ssh-pam file over to your /etc/pam.d directory - that step is in the doc, so look for it. I hope this helps, and if it's completely unwanted, sorry for the intrusion, but if you are connecting from outside your home/office (or maybe even then, depending who you work with) you might want to give SSH a try.

Thanks Damien I can get the # behind my name so it looks like i am user root. Thanks Nick this could work but i'm only using linux for three months and i want to know a litle bit more about it before i do this because the last three months i installed linux for about 10 times because i didn't know how to do some things (i did learn some things from it). Doug Berner your right it is RH7.0 and it is unsave to telnet into a machine like that but there isn't anything on that machine that needs to be save for the rest of the world. I was just interested in linux and want to learn how it works because it might be the future. So i have an old machine with a P90 and i installed linuxworkstation on it and i want to install an linux server to on an other old machine just for learning at this point. The only problem i have is i don't have enough room for monitors so i want to manage these machines remote and i understand that for example if i want to shutdown the machine i have to be a root. BTW if i know a bit more about linux i might install SSH but for now i think i have to learn still a lot (downloaded 60mb how-to pdf files)

I may be wrong but, I heard from a friend that logging in as Root is unsecure, correct if I am wrong, I have never used linux before, only here at this forum to learn.

I was gonna warn you about telnet, but Doug seems to have done a fine job. Definitely use SSH v2. Don't use Telnet!! You should configure SSH2 to *require* public key authentication if your usage allows this. You can su to root after you are logged in if you want.