theoretical question - can root's username be changed?

John Summerfied debian at herakles.homelinux.org
Fri Dec 2 04:46:45 UTC 2005


Jeff Vian wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-12-01 at 21:15 -0500, Claude Jones wrote:
> 
>>Subject line says it all...
> 
> of course, (in practice if not in fact)
> 
> root is actually a username in /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow.
> That user can be given any name you choose, but be very careful.  Other
> programs depend on the username of root.  /etc/aliases is an example
> where NOT having the username root would break things for mail.
Actually, alias shouldn't be a problem. One should always redirect 
root's mail to some admin type who reads it oneself.


> 
> You can easily give some other user the root privileges ( UID=0, GID=0 )
> and use that account instead of root for the same authority. (Note that
> this applies to the standard Linux authentication and may not apply in
> the same way to SELinux.)

I'm sure selinux won't care, but many scripts are likely to. Do a little 
grepping to see what might care, or simply do it.

You can always boot from CD to recover.

-- 

Cheers
John

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