donald.ritchey AT exeloncorp DOT com on Wed  6/08 12:13 -0500:
> And anyone who can get local root on his/her workstation 
> can use 'amrecover' to obtain any filesystem backed up from 
> 'localhost', since localhost is valid on any system.

then what prevents joe user from just modifying /etc/hosts
on his machine to pretend he is the system he wants to
restore from?

what prevents DNS admin from changing his zone files so he
can recover /etc/passwd on some machine he doesn't control
but wants to?