On Sun, 29 Oct 2000 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > In a message dated 29-Oct-00 18:07:05 Central Standard Time, > [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > > > > how do you setup a second user to have the same access as root > > a user that will be able to change root password. > > In novell that is one of the first things we were taught was to have 2 admin > > accounts so you wont get locked out of your system. Here's an option I haven't seen anyone mention yet: if you haven't already, check out the excellent "sudo" package. RPMs should be available on www.rpmfind.net. It lets you set up a user to have full or partial root access without having to have the root password, and it logs everything the user does as root. For example, on my home machine, I have account "jeff". I've set up sudo so that "jeff" has root priviledges. If I want to do something that only "root" can do, like run "vipw", I would run it like this: $ sudo vipw Sudo would then ask me for my password (as opposed to the root password), would log the fact that I tried to run vipw, and would execute vipw for me as root. Advantages: 1. It saves lots of logging out and in, having to open a separate xterm just for root access, etc. 2. It provides a log of what I've done, in case I need to backtrack. 3. If I ever see that someone has actually logged in as root, I know there's something odd going on, because I do it so rarely. 4. If I need to recover root access, I can use sudo access to do it. "sudo passwd root" ought to work (I haven't tried it yet), and even if it doesn't I can get a root shell with "sudo su -" (which I've verified works). - Jeff
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