sudo versus #

[Pastor JW]

On Wednesday 10 February 2010 1:43:40 pm Bill Marcum wrote:
> On 2010-02-10, KAYVEN RIESE <kayve at sfsu.edu> wrote:
> >
> > Also, I notice that when Ubuntu gives me those update dialog boxes my
> > root password doesn't work to allow the installation to go forward.  This
> > makes me irritated, because it instead wants my normal user password,
> > which for me by design is a weaker password that I use for more things
> > and thus could be more easily cracked.  My root password is longer and I
> > use it for less things.  Both are immune to dictionary attack, but it
> > bothers me the way this subverts my configuration.

So remember how frustrated and irritated you became trying to install 
something as root.  Think about it from the point of view of person trying to 
hack into your system.  He of course first tries the root account and spends 
some time trying to find a non-existant password for root.  He could then 
turn to the users of the machine , my laptop alone has five users, and find 
after some time that most of them also don't even have all superuser 
privileges move to the nextuser and find his password only to find he has 
printing privilege but can't write to root either and likely he doesn't 
understand sudo even as well as you do.  How much time is he willing to spend 
trying all the different frustrating at every turn attempts to break into 
root before he gives up and goes to an easier target like the sap who HAS 
enabled a root password!

> As you know, by default Ubuntu doesn't have a root password. If you know
> enough to create a root password, you can customize the security in
> other ways. You can edit the /etc/sudoers file to make it require the
> root password instead, or to execute specific commands without requiring
> a password. See "man sudoers".

A very good pro and con description can be found at 
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RootSudo that explains it all way better 
than I can.  You can fine tune how much privilege each of your users has on 
the system.  It also shows how to enable and disable the root password.  

-- 
73 de N7PSV aka Pastor JW <n><   PDGA# 35276
http://the-inner-circle.org  _Registered Kubuntu User: #27403
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