Encrypted home partition accessible by administrator

[Colin Law]

On Sun, 21 Apr 2019 at 22:25, Bret Busby <bret.busby at gmail.com> wrote:
> ...
> I wonder whether logging in as the user and using something like (as user)
> chmod 007 /home
> or
> chmod 007 .
>
> (I remember a rather unfortunate case where, in a UNIX unit, some
> decades ago, a classmate made the rather unfortunate mistake of
> entering, at the command line,
> chmod .
> That dot is what was entered in that command, not a punctuation mark
> to indicate the end of the sentence.
> His account could not be recovered. And, it was not me...

Why could an administrator not use sudo chmod to put it back as it
should be.  Or if that was not possible for some reason then boot from
a live image, mount the drive, and do it from there?

Nothing of that sort will stop an administrator using sudo to access
the files, as far as I know.

Colin