F10 and no root login - impossible to maintain systems!

[Casey Dahlin]

Jud Craft wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 4:19 AM, Rahul Sundaram
> <sundaram at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>   
>> What are the specific use cases, where non technical users are being
>> compelled to login as root (and other alternatives won't work)?
>>     
>
> The chief compelling one he mentions seems to be when NFS goes down
> and Linux can't find the /home partition.
>
> Or, to put it bluntly, when the Linux distribution isn't smart enough
> to protect "non-technical users" (an admittedly subjective term) from
> technical problems.  Which is often.
>
> But your critique, Mr. Sundaram, doesn't seem to imply that people
> shouldn't login as root -- merely that you disagree with allowing them
> to open a root session in X.  To be rhetorical, we must ask, why?
> After all, there's no such thing as "partial root power" -- you either
> have full root privileges in a terminal in a normal user X session, or
> full root privileges in a root X session.
>
> Here's the why:  you feel that a root X session is too insecure --
> which it may indeed be.  So we believe that the "ideal" method is to
> not allow X root logins.  But keep in mind, this is not actually an
> ideal.  It's a kludge to go around the fact that X is designed rather
> horribly from a security standpoint.  The "user session only" method
> allows you to work around that.
>   
If I gave you a gun that had an excellent safety mechanism that was 
presently activated, would you be willing to play Russian roulette?

The point of having a separate root user is not to trust things. It 
doesn't matter how much effort we put into securing them, if they don't 
need to run as root, they never should. Gnome-panel doesn't need to ever 
run as root.

--CJD