About root or administrative account

[Jeffrey F. Bloss]

Derek Broughton wrote:

> Wei-Yee Chan wrote:
> 
> > Derek Broughton wrote:
> >> Of course it doesn't.  But you said you used "root" because you came from
> >> a RedHat environment, and I just pointed out that in the RedHat
> >> environment I use, I don't have a clue if you _can_ log in as root,
> >> because RedHat doesn't require you to be able to login to root, either.
> >>   
> > Fedora and Redhat do not take the sudo approach - They do not disable
> > the root account by default.  How do U suppose administration was done
> > then?  U might wanna reinstall your system to verify what I've said, but
> > to save U some time, U should just ask the people on the newsgroups. :-)
> 
> You're not taking my point.  I didn't say Redhat uses the same approach as
> Ubuntu, but it _does_ provide sudo.  I didn't say Redhat disables root, but

It should also be pointed out that a given distribution's defaults
don't necessarily reflect any security policy accurately. In fact,
unless the logic behind a given default policy is specifically stated
the defaults themselves are irrelevant to any discussion of security.
They're just as likely to be the product of a marketing strategy as
they are any security philosophy, and almost certainly a compromise
between the two. IOW, what Fedora does or doesn't do is essentially
nothing but a red herring to begin with.

So is what Debian/Ubuntu does as far as that goes. The fact that root
logins are disabled by default isn't a valid indication of which policy
is "best", it's more a matter of coincidentally being "better" because
Ubuntu's willingness to compromise is skewed slightly differently than
Fedora's.

-- 
     _?_      Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend.
    (o o)         Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.
-oOO-(_)--OOo------------------------------[ Groucho Marx ]---
                    http://wrench.homelinux.net/~jeff/

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