Advantages of 'sudo' Over 'su'?

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Fri, Oct 01, 2004 at 02:21:06PM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 30, 2004 at 09:16:38PM -0400, Brett Kirksey wrote:
> > I've been curious about this since I run OS X as well. What are
> > the advantages of disabling the root account and adding a user
> > or group to sudoers with root priveleges? Can a user given the
> > same priveleges as root in sudoers do everything that root can?
> > If so, why bother disabling root? The sudoer could just type
> > sudo su and get the same result as su if root wre enabled?
> 
> The original reason we disabled the root account was simply that it was
> two more questions we could avoid asking at installation time. :-)

And even more significantly, a question whose answer the user needed to
remember forever, even though they would rarely use it.  Root passwords are
often forgotten by users who are new to the Unix security model.

-- 
 - mdz