set up a root password

[Derek Broughton]

Gene Heskett wrote:

> On Tuesday 05 August 2008, Derek Broughton wrote:
>>Gene Heskett wrote:
>>> OTOH, that shell with root priv's should somehow make itself marked as
>>> such by a border color change or something, as when popping around to
>>> the various terminal shells running, it would be too easy to hit the
>>> wrong but root shell and mess the whole thing up.
>>
>>Can you imagine a way to do this?  It's a good idea, but I don't know if
>>it could be done.
>>
> I would think that the /root/.bashrc could effect that.

Yeah, I was just thinking of that - at least bash has some support for
coloring output.  It's not something I've played with.

In that case "sudo -i" would get colored (as would "su" if you had a root
password), "sudo -s" wouldn't.  I really don't recommend "sudo -s" anyway.

>>> I could log into.  But its a one way street, because the only way to
>>> undo it seems to be a re-install.  Which I did on that box.
>>
>>Just lock the root account.  "sudo passwd -l root".  "root" already exists
>>on any Linux system, so this is how its implemented in Ubuntu.
> 
> Yes, but what happens to sudu under that lock?

It doesn't hurt sudo - I did try it.  I figured the least I could do before
giving someone advice that could potentially be, at the very least, a
massive PITA was try it on my own machine :-)
-- 
derek