Locking Root and using Sudo with Debian

[Anthony M Simonelli]

At my company, I run two Ubuntu servers and one Debian server because each platform is more suited for its primary function.  I like the sudo model of Ubuntu and the fact that they lock out the root user by default.  

Is there a way to set up my Debian server to match that same model to make it consistent with the Ubuntu servers?  Does adding administrator to the sudo users file and running passwd -l root achieve the results or are there more changes that need to be made?  This is a Debian Sarge (yes I'm going to upgrade to stable) server and I've noticed that I am still restricted using sudo but in Ubuntu I am not (maybe that has changed with Etch?).  For example, restarting a service with invoke-rc.d works with sudo in Ubuntu, but not with Debian Sarge?