On Wed, February 4, 2015 10:35 am, Scott Robbins wrote:
On Wed, Feb 04, 2015 at 08:18:23AM -0800, Keith Keller wrote:
On 2015-02-04, James B. Byrne byrnejb@harte-lyne.ca wrote:
One might question why *nix distributions insist on providing a known point of attack to begin with. Why does user 0 have to be called root? Why not beatlebailey, cinnamon or pasdecharge?
That is more or less what OS X does. User 0 still exists, and it's labelled as "root", but there is no way (unless the owner goes way out of his way) to actually log in as root. The first account created is given full sudo access, and can choose to grant sudo to subsequently created users. (Users with sudo can still get a root shell, but that's not the same as logging in as root.)
I thought Ubuntu did this as well, but I haven't installed Ubuntu for quite a while. Anyone know?
Yes, I think they were one of the first ones to do it. I remember thinking at the time, ah, copying Apple.
Note: Ubuntu was first released in 2004. As a matter of fact Ubuntu is one of the clones of Debian which was first released in 1993. Apple OS 10 (based on opendarwin) - the only one of Mac OSes "root - sudo" talk can be relevant to was first shipped on their machines later than 2002 as I recall (wikiedia is really vague on the date MacOS 10 was first shipped, I have to rely on my memory). So, I would say, Ubuntu wasn't copying Apple, they are just a clone of Debian. And Debian is older system than MacOS 10.
I'm not a historian, so someone probably will correct me, if I'm wrong here.
Just my $0.02
Valeri
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++