Authentication failure??

[Sean Carolan]

> What are the reasons for doing it this way? If sudo is set up so you can 
> do everything through it, how is this different / less risky in practice 
> from having a normal root account with a separate password? (Apart from 
> there being one less password to remember).

If you're just running one or two commands it may be better to use sudo. 
    It is safer than leaving the root prompt open all the time.  Also, 
on multi-user systems you may want to know who is running commands with 
root privileges.

Another thing to note is that recent versions of Ubuntu have replaced 
root's default shell with dash instead of bash.  I am not sure why this 
was done, and I didn't find out about it until some of my shell scripts 
broke after upgrading!