About root or administrative account

[Tony Arnold]

David,

David B Teague wrote:
> Note that one chooses his advice by choosing his adviser. Nevertheless 
> I'm asking this question here, in the hope of getting both sides of an 
> issue that has bothered me since discovering *buntu.
> 
> A pundit from TechRepublic made the following remark about the *buntu 
> distributions:
> *
> 
> *Question: How about a bad one [distribution]?*
> *
> This is easy, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Xubuntu are bad distros,
> they killed security by disabling root account. Any distro with no
> system admin account is bad.
> 
> 
> Please argue for me both sides of this feature. I admit to having qualms 
> about *buntu not having a root account.

This is wrong! Ubuntu does have a root account, it's just that by
default, there is no password set, so you cannot log in with the root
account, by default. Have a look at /etc/passwd and you will see root there.

Instead, Ubuntu uses the sudo system which has a fine degree of control
over allowing users to do various things with root privileges. By
default the first user created on an Ubuntu system can use sudo to do
anything as root.

Have a look at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RootSudo for more details.

Whether this more or less secure as having a root account that can be
used directly is not clear to me and will probably be argued about in
this thread for some time. At the end of the day, it's probably personal
perference. If you want to login as root or use the su command, then
just use sudo to set a password for the root account.

Regards,
Tony.
-- 
Tony Arnold, IT Security Coordinator, University of Manchester,
IT Services Division, Kilburn Building, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL.
T: +44 (0)161 275 6093, F: +44 (0)870 136 1004, M: +44 (0)773 330 0039
E: tony.arnold at manchester.ac.uk, H: http://www.man.ac.uk/Tony.Arnold