From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Jan 7 7: 8:42 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from dire.bris.ac.uk (dire.bris.ac.uk [137.222.10.60]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D5B7237B419 for ; Mon, 7 Jan 2002 07:08:35 -0800 (PST) Received: from mail.ilrt.bris.ac.uk by dire.bris.ac.uk with SMTP-PRIV with ESMTP; Mon, 7 Jan 2002 15:08:19 +0000 Received: from cmjg (helo=localhost) by mail.ilrt.bris.ac.uk with local-esmtp (Exim 3.16 #1) id 16NbL2-0005cR-00; Mon, 07 Jan 2002 15:05:24 +0000 Date: Mon, 7 Jan 2002 15:05:24 +0000 (GMT) From: Jan Grant X-X-Sender: To: Cliff Sarginson Cc: FreeBSD-questions Subject: FYI Re: Can I rename root? In-Reply-To: <20020107143958.GA2968@raggedclown.net> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Mon, 7 Jan 2002, Cliff Sarginson wrote: > On Mon, Jan 07, 2002 at 03:07:45PM +0100, Roman Neuhauser wrote: > > Truth is that telling someone to do or to avoid something, not > > telling them why (giving an example), turns the advice into a dogma, > > and I don't think that's very useful. > Does it ? Yes; that's what "cargo-cult" sysadmin is all about. Slightly more on-topic: the notion of "root" is (very, very slowly) going away - see Trusted Solaris ferinstance. TrustedBSD is working on much the same kind of thing - "fine-grained system capabilities". FS ACLs might be a more obvious output of the project, but the notion is that instead of a single "superuser" account, core system admin roles may be split amongst accounts. Thus you would be able to have, say, a security event auditor who could review audit logs, but with little or no other privileges; and (in a simple scenario) a lower-powered "root" who could do everything else _except_ modify their audit trail. This is, however, some time away from FreeBSD-STABLE (maybe in 5.0?*). > End of thread. jan * that's speculation. -- jan grant, ILRT, University of Bristol. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/ Tel +44(0)117 9287088 Fax +44 (0)117 9287112 RFC822 jan.grant@bris.ac.uk That which does not kill us goes straight to our thighs. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message