ubuntu-users Digest, Vol 16, Issue 93

[David Hart]

On Thu, Dec 08, 2005 at 09:32:32AM +0200, Bill Cairns wrote:
> If I have to give my grand-daughter my root password to connect to the internet, she would immediately have the power to completely destroy my operating system. (By mistake surely, but mistakes are easy to make!)

Please re-read what I wrote in my earlier post.

By default, root is disabled on Ubuntu.  When you need to perform tasks
that ask for a password it asks for your _user_ password, not root.
If the user has sufficient privileges the user will be allowed to
perform the task.

By default, the first user on an Ubuntu system has the equivalent of
root privileges and can perfrom those tasks through sudo.

When you add a user to the system, you can control in quite fine
detail what tasks a user is allowed to perform.  Have a look at:

    System -> Administration -> Users and Groups

Click on the properties button for a user and then the User Privileges
tab.

Now, if you use the System -> Administration -> Networking applet to
dial up you will have to grant full admin privileges to users.  To me
that's not a problem as I'm the only user on this box and I rarely use
dial up anyway.  If that's a problem for you then fine, don't use it.

Do a search in synaptic for dial up tools that don't need full admin
privs (gnome-ppp, for example).  There've been other dial up tools
mentioned several times on this list over the past couple of days.
 
-- 
David Hart <ubuntu at tonix.org>