On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 3:33 AM, Chris Bannister
<mockingbird@earthlight.co.nz> wrote:
On Mon, Jan 31, 2011 at 12:37:05AM -0600, Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote:
> In <20110131040038.GA3315@fischer>, Chris Bannister wrote:
> >On Sun, Jan 30, 2011 at 02:40:01PM +0200, Andrei Popescu wrote:
> >> If you do an expert install you are offered the choice to disable root
> >> logins and use sudo instead. Yes, this is on Debian, squeeze installer.
> >
> >Oh! ok. Then again, "expert" does imply that you know what you are
> >doing, which seems a bit backwards.
>
> I maintain that experts will be more likely to use sudo than su. It
> provides better granularity and helps avoid password sharing. A password
> shared is a password compromised.
Right. But being the expert you probably won't be asking questions where
the answer is something like "sudo <whatever>"
But as is more likely someone asking for advice where the answer is
"sudo <whatever>" are either not experts, and hence it wouldn't have been
configured when they installed squeeze, and therefore the answer "sudo
<whatever>" won't work, or, they are running Ubuntu where it would work
BUT as we all know (all together now) "Ubuntu is NOT Debian."
Am I misunderstanding something?
I'm pretty sure that Debian ships with sudo, or at least it did in my recent Squeeze desktop installation (late November 2010). Sudo wasn't configured (I ran visudo as root to set it up), but I didn't have to add the package (which I usually do in any Unix/Linux I use).
I use OpenBSD as well, and it also ships with sudo (again, it needs to be configured by root with visudo).
Whether you like or hate Ubuntu, it does get one in the habit of using sudo, and I've continued doing so on all my systems, not just those running Ubuntu (of which I still have one box).