that darned ROOT problem

[Bo Grimes]

Arjan Geven wrote:

> On 9/28/05, *Steve Kratz* <stevek at cipafilter.com 
> <mailto:stevek at cipafilter.com>> wrote:
>
>     > I am a bit bothered by sudo anyway.  I have 5 kids.  I
>     > encourage them all to use Linux, but I don't worry about them
>     > screwing with the system.  They all know my user password.
>     > With Ubuntu they could now do anything they want in the GUI
>     > with that password.  This will force me to change my password
>     > and set them up a seperate account.
>     >
>     > No biggie, but I don't like the idea that anyone with my user
>     > passward has complete control of my system.  It's not like
>     > I'm a system admin.
>     > I'm just a dad on a home pc, so I don't protect my user
>     > password from my family and I don't bother with 7 seperate accounts.
>
>
> Multiple kids, multiple users... simplest solution, really. They can 
> each have their own data and everything they want as their own users. 
> You are the administrator, and have sudo rights. Why negate that whole 
> security model and just have one user?


You're right, of course.  There's no use arguing against it, but *nix 
was never really "planned" out as a non-networked home environment, and 
I'm not worried about internal "security".   I do worry they'll 
accidentally mess my environment up.

Basically it's laziness.  I have Thunderbird set up with everyone's 
email address and we like being able to just sit down after one person 
finishes and read our mail.  Same with web browsing.  Which family of 7 
wants to bother with logging off the internet, logging out, relogging in 
as a new user, dialing up , opening a browser, etc?

I guess the best soultion would be my account and a single kids 
account.  If I had several computers all running Linux on a network...