Another reason to prefer a real root over sudo

[Chris G]

On Thu, Feb 05, 2009 at 09:32:00AM -0500, Rashkae wrote:
> Chris G wrote:
> > On Wed, Feb 04, 2009 at 06:38:15PM -0500, Dave Woyciesjes wrote:
> >> Res wrote:
> >>> On Wed, 4 Feb 2009, Dave Woyciesjes wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> 	In other words, it's all about personal choice. You can go ahead and
> >>>> shoot yourself in the foot, if you like. I choose not to.
> >>> no, you cant make that assumption, because to do so, says your favouring 
> >>> sudo, which for reasons stated before may not be everybody case,
> >>>
> >> 	Actually, all I was saying that everyone has a _choice_ as to how they 
> >> want to do admin work on their Linux box. You do it you way, someone 
> >> else can do it their way. There is no one perfect answer, it's all 
> >> circumstantial.
> >>
> > Yes, but as I have pointed out, if you set up a root login on Ubuntu
> > some things don't work any more because they *assume* the default sudo
> > setup, services-admin is a case in point.
> > 
> 
> Chris, I'm sorry I missed this conversation.. could you tell me what the
> subject was or what the date the thread was started?  I've never had
> trouble running admin applications with su to root,, other than the
> vexing problem with console-kit that requires a manual launch of
> ck-session, as we discussed over the ssh thing,, But that really has
> little or nothing to do with sudo, and everything to do with policy-kit.
> 
I'm not sure when I raised it I'm afraid.  I think it must have been
fairly recently (i.e. since 8.10 was released) but I'm not absolutely sure.

Anyway, the issue is that you run services-admin (from the command
line or via the menus) when you click on Unlock it asks for your
*user* password not the root password.  Since the user doesn't have
sudo privileges this doesn't work.

Actually the above doesn't seem to be the case any more, the problem
is the other way around.  I just tried running services-admin and, as
expected, it asked for my user password.  When I gave it *my* password
it unlocked successfully which it shouldn't have done, I'm not in the
sudoers file.

-- 
Chris Green