[K12OSN] synaptic and K12LSTP repositories

[Petre Scheie]

Eric Harrison wrote:
> On Sun, 21 Aug 2005, Mike Heins wrote:
> 
>> Quoting Les Mikesell (les at futuresource.com):
>>
>>> On Sun, 2005-08-21 at 13:22, Mike Heins wrote:
>>>
>>>> In practice, webmin seems to be pretty secure and there are a lot
>>>> of people using it successfully. I will admit to placing it a couple
>>>> of places where the system administrators don't have strong Linux
>>>> knowledge. But I don't think it is the right way to run a railroad
>>>> if you have an alternative.
>>>
>>>
>>> Unfortunately, 'the alternative' is years of experience...
>>
>>
>> I didn't mean to try and sound like I was talking from the top
>> of a mountain, not at all. Though I have the years of experience,
>> I recognize that not everyone does.
>>
>> I was just explaining why I think it is not configured into
>> k12ltsp by default.
>>
> 
> You missed the main reason Webmin is not installed by default...
> 
> The official Webmin packages copy the root password from /etc/passwd
> (or /etc/shadow) when the package is installed. During the process
> of installing the operating system, the root password is empty.
> If Webmin is installed as part of the OS, it ends up with root
> rights and no password. From a security perspective, the results
> are non-optimal ;-)
> 
> The two choices were to maintain a customized Webmin package that
> works around this issue or to have an option to install Webmin
> after the install was complete. Maintaining customized packages
> can put a huge drag on K12LTSP development, thus the post-install
> option was quite attractive.
> 
> -Eric
> 
And I must say the post-install option worked like a champ.  Thanks for building that 
option, Eric.

Petre