can't run gnome as root - addition - SOLVED

[Avi Greenbury]

Patrick Asselman wrote:
> As far as I'm aware, ssh does (by default) not allow root to login
> anyway, so whether or not root is enabled on the box is irrelevant
> to the ssh security. (If you have ever checked your ssh logs for an
> online box, you will understand why this is disabled. (Of course a
> closed port is much more secure)).

Root is only disabled as a side-effect of the user not having a
password set; if you set a root password on a Ubuntu machine, root may
log in.

> I've witnessed an (experienced!) unix user become very pale all of a
> sudden. After confirming he didn't have some sort of stroke, it
> turned out he had accidentally used an "rm *" and it took much
> longer than expected... it turned out he was in a directory he
> wasn't expecting to be in (i.e. / ). After that I became a convinced
> user of sudo :-)

After a while, `sudo rm *` becomes just as likely to happen as `rm *`.

If you're routinely doing the sorts of things that if done wrong can
break stuff, you're fairly likely to get them wrong and break things
from time to time, even if you prepend every command with the same
five characters. Sudo is, IMO, _much_ more about auditing and
restricting who can do what as root than it is about somehow
preventing rooty mistakes from users with the privilege to make them.

-- 
Avi