David Goodenough wrote:
You can also use sudo, and that gives two things.
Firstly very few people actually need to know the root password, and secondly it logs everything that is done using sudo and by whom, giving you an audit trait. Authentication is done with their own passwords and the /etc/sudoers file which says what that person is allowed to do.
David
Yep. If you try hard enough you can get most done through sudo and we do so on our shared systems because of the audit trail (see http://www.vm.ibm.com/events/nl78.PDF for proof ;-). We still prefer to authenticate with private key rather than type the password on all foreign systems. But on systems where I am the only root I tend to logon root directly through public/private keys.
Rob
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