On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 4:23 PM, Alan Altmark <alan_altm...@us.ibm.com> wrote: > > There is trust and there is Trust (the latter includes a measure of > "personal integrity"). For those whom you Trust, root access is > permitted, but do it by giving them all uid 0, not by sharing passwords. > Since each user has a different pid, the audit trail can be more closely > examined to see who did what. (Watch out for a reducation program that > gives you a username when you have shared uids.)
I have heard that suggestion before, and it appears to come from those who never tried it. I recall that several things get messy when you don't maintain a 1-to-1 mapping of names and uid 0. IIRC the reverse mapping goes through the nscd cache and the result will change color depending on who is looking. The most scary one is seeing yourself as the owner of the file although you never created it. It also breaks stuff that tests for root, and &deity knows what. We were perfectly able to manage Linux systems and not use the root account. Just sudo. As close to logonby and PROP as you can get. If nothing else, it was good to end discussions when someone brought his manager to convince us that he needed the root password: there is no root password. Most things go easy via sudo, and if you have more complicated things you can invoke the shell with the -c option to issue one command (that is being logged clearly). So the audit trail showed who issued what command. It's not as good as a console log of a VM user that also shows the output (but then you take care to keep things "visible" for those that need to follow your steps and not issue commands from XEDIT). Rob ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@vm.marist.edu with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
