that darned ROOT problem

[Bo Grimes]

Mike Bird wrote:

>On Wed, 2005-09-28 at 07:23, Bo Grimes wrote:
>  
>
>>No biggie, but I don't like the idea that anyone with my user passward 
>>has complete control of my system.  It's not like I'm a system admin.  
>>I'm just a dad on a home pc, so I don't protect my user password from my 
>>family and I don't bother with 7 seperate accounts.
>>    
>>
>
>Ubuntu is good in many ways but the root/sudo gimic is utter lossage. 
>Giving unrequested sudo permission to the first user account is a MAJOR
>SECURITY HOLE.
>
>The lack of a root password is a considerable annoyance when your
>install broke and you have to hunt around to find the clue as to how to
>become root to fix it.  For home users, this may well occur when they
>don't have convenient Internet access because of the installation
>failure.
>
>We have some Ubuntu internally but we install other distros on
>customers' systems so they won't get confused trying to learn *nix.
>
>Give people an option during install if you like.  Permit, but don't
>dictate.
>

I agree, and couldn't have said it better.  This is what I meant when I 
wrote "In general my problem with the Ubuntu approach to this is it 
makes a lot of assumptions about who a user is and how he uses the 
system and what his needs will be."  One of the reasons I came to Linux 
from windows was I hated being dictated to.