Submitted by “This tutorial shows how to set up a PXE install server with Ubuntu 6.10. A PXE install server allows your client computers to boot and install a Linux distribution over the network, without the need of burning Linux iso images onto a CD/DVD, boot floppy images, etc. In this article I show how to configure a PXE server that allows you to boot multiple distributions: Ubuntu Edgy/Dapper, Debian Etch/Sarge, Fedora Core 6, CentOS 4.4, OpenSuSE 10.2, and Mandriva 2007.”
At least the author has enough sense to advocate the ‘sudo passwd root’ option.
I gave up on sudo long ago, but then again, all my linux work is on servers, and in the terminal. To type sudo before every command is pointless.
Maybe not pointless to my mind, but definately annoying.
To each his own. I used to find it annoying, being accustomed to just su into the root account, but these day sudo has just become second nature.
Then again, my machines are dektops/laptops…I agree that if I was on a server activating the root account would probably be mandatory.
In a server, Sudo can be a security problem waiting to happen. But in a desktop, I don’t think there’s any problem.
Letting every admin in your organization share one root password is equally dangerous.
With sudo you can log succesful as well as unsuccsesful attempts, and you can have greater granularity of what each admin is allowed to do.
Just make sure that nobody is allowed to do things like sudo /bin/bash and sudo will be a very useful tool.
We have it set so that you cannot log in via SSH using the root account, rather you have to use your account then su into root. Then in the logs you can see whom became root in case of auditing.
“In a server, Sudo can be a security problem waiting to happen.”
I think you need to explain exactly how sudo can be a “security problem waiting to happen” and using the root account isn’t.
Anyway, sudo can be used to prevent some common mistakes (mistakenly typing “rm -rf /”, for example) that could have quite dire consequences.
good grief, how hard is “sudo bash” ? After that, everything is run as root, you don’t need to type sudo before every command if you don’t want to.
If you allow “sudo bash” you’ve just lost the whole point of implementing sudo in the first place and may as well allow su to root. If sudo is done right then sudo bash won’t work, if sudo is done wrong, and sudo bash works, you’re better off not using it.
What about creating e.g.
#!/bin/sh
bash
and running it with sudo ?
Again, if it works, you’re sudo setup isn’t doing what it’s supposed to do and you may as well let people su to root.