First off, Rackspace's cloud services has totally different CS staff than their managed hosting services. I'm a managed customer and this has never happened. In

First off, Rackspace's cloud services has totally different CS staff than their managed hosting services. I'm a managed customer and this has never happened. In fact, I had to deal with their cloud CS people regarding a DNS issue and got the run around. Anyway, the managed folks ask for your portal password and a challenge question (high school mascot). In the 4 years I've used them, they have never asked for a root password to one of my boxes. And, BTW, Softlayer does ask for your machine's root password in their support ticket form.