[GRLUG] Distro's - was GRLUG test comment

[Adam bultman]

It comes down to people liking to traipse around as root.

When you use sudo, you need to do things on purpose - sudo this, sudo 
that, and after a while, it's irritating. It's much easier to su - root, 
and just run around and do what you want, but you lose the 'thinking 
about what you're doing' factor.

I discourage fellow admins from running around as root, since people 
*do* make mistakes, and that prompt for a password on the sudo command 
has saved me multiple times. Similarly, I've been present when someone 
running around as root does something horribly dumbassed, and I've got 
to help clean up, if not do it all.

First thing I do on my ubuntu boxes is set a root password.  That way, I 
can clean up any filesystem damage if it drops to a shell when booting.  
If I have a few things to do, I use sudo. If I have a few commands in a 
string I need, I do 'sudo bash'.  If I want to run around as root, I'll 
just do 'sudo su - ' and become root, do my tasks, and then be done with 
it.  Time spent running around as root per month: Perhaps 3 minutes. 
Time spent using sudo: Very large.

Adam


Tim Schmidt wrote:
> On 5/4/06, David Pembrook <david at pembrook.net> wrote:
>   
>>  I was playing around with distro's that day.. I remember it looked good and
>> I had to fix it. I hacked mine to operate as I expect it to. My only point
>> is:
>>
>>  No matter how you slice it, the root user is taken away by default and
>> replaced with sudo. I use sudo on other systems when I want to and su to
>> root when I want to.
>>
>>  Again every issue I have with it can be addressed, its Linux. Its personal
>> taste.
>>
>>  Dave
>>     
>
> I'm sorry Dave, I don't follow your logic...  You have /root, you have
> a way to escalate privileges, what are you missing?  Exactly what can
> you not do with sudo as efficiently or effectively as you can with su?
>  How are you doing things differently?
>
> --tim
> _______________________________________________
> grlug mailing list
> grlug at grlug.org
> http://shinobu.grlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/grlug
>