[Linux] Ubuntu 7.10 and su or sudo

[Robert Citek]

On 1/12/08, lou <lou@lous-stuff.com> wrote:
>  You don't say what you tried or if it ever worked but Ubuntu is a "little
> different" in this area. When you do a sudo, it wants YOUR password, not the
> root password (there isn't one by default). If you wan to use su to switch
> to root, you have to set a password. You can do this by:
>  sudo passwd root
>  It will ask for your password and then ask you to enter a root password
> twice. After that, you can use su, just like the big kids :)

Many of the "big kids" as moving to using sudo.  Two of many reasons:

1) finer grain control of rights versus su
2) logging of who did what using sudo

>  Many of the Ubuntu gurus see doing that as a security exposure. Dummies
> like me see it as overcoming an inconvenience.

Alternatively, add this to your ~/.bashrc:

alias su="sudo su"

and supply your password when prompted.

BTW, now that root has a password, you may want to lock down all the
services where root could log in.  For example, the default sshd
install:

$ grep -i root /etc/ssh/sshd_config
PermitRootLogin yes

Do the same for any subsequent services you install.

Regards,
- Robert