Firewalls and Virusscanners

[Brian McKee]

On Mon, 2009-05-25 at 20:41 -0400, Darryl Moore wrote:
> These are interesting points.
> 
> I give root a password on my network machines. They are all strong
> passwords, and every machine has a different root password, so that if
> one gets compromised it doesn't directly threaten the entire network.
> I know Ubuntu doesn't allow root login, and I presume the idea behind
> this is to simply provide a second unknown (the  access user name) to
> a would be intruder.  This really is no more secure than having a
> sufficiently strong password though.

No, that's not really the idea.
Sudo allows you to give equiv to root access to more than one person,
without them sharing a password, thus you can remove one without
affecting the other.  It also keeps a log of all activities, and *who
did them* so you can find out which turkey actually made the mistake :-)

see https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RootSudo if you aren't familiar
with it. (even though it claims the same security thru obscurity user
name routine you mention)

Brian
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