ROOT access from remote computer.

Redhat by default won't allow root access from another machine because it is a security hole. It is better to set up a user account and give that account permission to do the things you want to do.

Okee thanks for the information swwelsh.

Vincent

 You can't login as root directly from another machine (or at least not without editing some config files.  However, DON'T setup a user account with root permissions - that's just like having a root login available.  Have a normal user account, and login using it, and then use the 'su' command to become root whenever you need extra privileges.

You should checkout the shadow-utils package.  In that package are programs to convert the passwd (pwconv and pwunconv) and group (grpconv and grpunconv) files to and from shadowed form as well as other information pertaining to shadowing.

 Oh yeah, I forgot to answer part 2).  It sounds like you might be using some system to add users which doesn't know about shadowed passwords.
  You should be able to just do it manually by editing /etc/passwd - just make sure you specify a * in the password field, and give the user a unique login and user id.  The shadow passwords are likely to be in /etc/shadow, but you may need to check the filename on your system.
  If you do use a program to create users, you can just copy the password it generates (from /etc/passwd) into /etc/shadow -- then just blank out the password in /etc/passwd with a *.  This should do the trick.

 If the system has even several users, though, it's most unlikely you'll ever get the same psuedo tty number.  I'd never make anything a secure device apart from the console.

Redhat 5.2 is setup to use shadow passwords but not by default.  Please look at the man pages for the conversions programs that I mentioned in my earlier comment.