Lock Screen as root

Stuart Sears stuart at sjsears.com
Fri May 26 15:53:50 UTC 2006


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Tim wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-05-26 at 00:29 -0400, Erik Hemdal wrote:
>> The "lock screen" operation in FC5 does not actually lock the screen
>> when the user is logged in as root.  I'm curious about why this is not
>> considered a serious bug.  When I log in as root, the Screensaver
>> Preferences applet shows the "lock screen when screensaver active" box
>> checked.  It informs root that the screen will lock when in fact, it
>> won't.
>>  
>> I've found the following:
>>  
>> On the fedora-list, Aaron Konstam noted that locking the screen as
>> root is something you don't want to do, because you should not log in
>> as root.

I would agree with this.

<snip>
> I suppose another aspect of leaving root logged in but locked out is
> that someone might walk up, see they're locked out, and restart X,
> clobbering anything that you wanted leaving running.

Incidentally there is a way to disable that:
edit xorg.conf and add something like this:

Section "Serverflags"
Option "DontZap"      "yes"
EndSection

or of course you can switch to a VT, log in and run
vlock -a

which will prevent VT switching back to X or anywhere else.

> I do agree with you that the preferences shouldn't suggest that the root
> user could lock the screen if it can't/won't.

Ack. it should be possible to find out if someone is running the
screensaver preferences dialogue as root.

Regards

Stuart
- --
Stuart Sears RHCA RHCSS RHCX RTFM PDQ ASAP LMFAO



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