Re: FW: What goes where?
Re: FW: What goes where?
- Subject: Re: FW: What goes where?
- From: Dave Schroeder <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 01 Mar 2003 19:20:38 -0600
[3] All unixes are different, and MacOS X is more so. Apple has
made some changes that just seem arbitrary (what's the point
of not having a "root" account?),
Ehh? Mac OS X has a root account; it is just disabled[1]. It can be
enabled any number of ways, most simply by setting a password for it
from any admin account:
sudo passwd root
But, why would you want or need this on the vast majority of Mac OS X
workstations? It's totally unnecessary.
You can do anything you would want or need to do, up to and including
giving yourself a full root shell, with 'sudo'.
The decision to ship with the root account disabled is not at all
arbitrary; it's in fact welcomed that Mac OS X does not need to have
the root account enabled. Having root disabled by default - and keeping
it disabled - is just one more "best practice" in Mac OS X
administration; one less privileged account's password that might be
exploited. Additionally, even on commercial and other UNIX systems,
it's much more desirable to use 'sudo' obtain privileged access to
commands, or for other tasks. Here, on the several hundred Solaris,
AIX, Linux, and other systems we manage, using root for anything after
the machine is set up is frowned upon; the root password is set to an
arbitrary string, sealed in an envelope, and locked away in case of an
emergency. Mac OS X, meanwhile, does not even need the root password to
be set at all for any administration tasks (with *extremely* rare
exceptions).
[1] Early in the days of Rhapsody and Mac OS X Server 1.x, the root
account password was set to the same as the original administrator
account's password. Today, the only machines that ship with root
enabled are the Xserve, where it is set to the first 8 characters of
the machine serial number. Having some fully privileged account is
necessary for full headless setup.
Regards,
Dave Schroeder
University of Wisconsin - Madison
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