root user

[Craig White]

On Sun, 2012-01-01 at 17:03 -0500, AV3 wrote:

> My mistake, deriving from the fact that I only use Mac OS and 
> Ubuntu-on-a-Mac. I over-generalized from my limited experience. I 
> thought that Unix was inherently more secure than Windows OS, whatever 
> the reason. Am I wrong about that? Why so, if not disabled root accounts?
----
on neither Mac OSX nor Ubuntu is root a disabled account - it simply
doesn't have a password. Not having a password doesn't mean that root is
disabled though - and if you are the 'first' user (ie, a member of
'admin' group), you can simply execute:

sudo su -

and you will get root shell with only your password which allows you to
run sudo. In general philosophy, both Ubuntu and Mac OSX believe that
there is no need for a root password and there's nothing inherently
wrong with the logic.

As for UNIX being inherently more secure than Windows... perhaps but
much of that logic comes from older versions of Windows whereas the
current versions of Windows 7 are reasonably secure. In general though,
both Windows and Macintosh OSX will out of the box make the first
installed user an administrator (super user aka root) by default whereas
most Linux distributions will not. This means that this first user will
always have super user privileges all the time and considering various
spyware/malware, that's probably a really poor idea on any OS. On Mac
OSX or Windows, it's relatively simple to create more users who are not
administrators for day to day usage and relatively simple to 'switch
user' when you need to install/update but many people do not.

Craig


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