New User.

Sean Miller sean at seanmiller.net
Mon Aug 8 08:50:27 UTC 2005


squareyes wrote:

>> This is a VERY common question, and if you did a quick search through
>> the wiki or FAQ you'd find the answer..
>> Ubuntu uses "sudo" instead of root.
>> the password is the password you entered for your user.
>> There IS a way to activate the root password but try doing the sudo
>> way for a while.. you'll get used to it quickly.
>
Personally my view is that not having a root password set initially is 
bad news, but understand why Ubuntu does it.

I did set my own root password - and this was for a very important 
reason. A few years back when working on hp-ux we had a problem where 
our /etc/sudoers file became corrupted and nobody but root could run 
some commands. I dread to think what would have happened had we had no 
root password - how would we have fixed it?

I work on the basis that you set your root password using "sudo passwd" 
(as you will find instructions in the wiki), note it down somewhere and 
then don't use it unless you have to.  Thus you gain all the protection 
of not logging in directly as root but know that you can if you need to 
from a command line or wherever...

As I said in another thread I think that the Ubuntu sudo has *too* much 
power. There should be some things that you can only do when logged in 
as root... but that's just my view...

Sean




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