Use of Root

[Jerry Feldman]

On Monday 31 January 2005 17:10, David Kramer wrote:

> ... All of which could have been handled by sudo.  With sudo, you can
> give mortals the power to run certain commands as root without the root
> password. Best of both worlds.  I know JABR is big on sudo.
I am also. With sudo, the sysadmin can give a user specific privs. For 
instance, I gave Rick Zach privilege to shutdown the system, so I didn't 
need to drive to Marlborough. 

> Since I am both Sysadmin and Power User at home, what I do is I have a
> separate login window on a separate vitrual window for root, and it has a
> red tinted background.  I consider this acceptable risk because I do
> regular backups, though.
I generally don't do that because I can always use sudo. I used to do that 
on my workstation in Nashua, but one day I did someting wrong. I decided 
that I would use the sux (no sudo then) command when I needed to be root. 

But, it comes down to whether the system admin people should extend some 
privileges to the user of the workstation. 

-- 
Jerry Feldman <gerald.feldman at hp.com>
Partner Technology Access Center (contractor) (PTAC-MA)
Hewlett-Packard Co.
550 King Street LKG2a-X2
Littleton, Ma. 01460
 (978)506-5243