[Gllug] Why have root passwords at all?

[John Winters]

On Sat, 2006-03-11 at 13:58 +0000, Bruce Richardson wrote:
[snip]
> Why not go the distance and make it entirely irrelevant?  Two options
> for this:
> 
> 	1.  Empty root password
> 	2.  Different randomly-generated root password on each box
> 
> Option 1 can be very safe if you put a little thought into it, since
> most user-authenticated applications can be made to refuse root logins
> and/or refuse access to accounts with blank passwords.

I'm not sure what you mean by a "user-authenticated application", but
surely if you have an empty root password then one can log on as root
just by typing "root" at the user prompt and pressing enter at the
password prompt?  Do you mean you want to put something like "*" (which
nothing will encrypt to) in the password field instead of having it
blank?

[snip]
> Comments welcome.

What about when the fsck detects errors during boot and the system says,
"Enter root password to run fsck interactively"?

John

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