sudo, not su.

[Jeffrey Kesselman]

Well, i understand. :)

I was very surprised to find that by default root has no password on the OLPC!

This seems a mite dangerous to me.  I can just imagine OLPC viri
springing up, propagtating through the mesh...

I'd love to have a proper sudo on the thing.  It would make me feel a
lot mreo comfortable.


On Dec 21, 2007 1:27 PM, C. Scott Ananian <cscott at laptop.org> wrote:
> I think people misunderstand the core problem: if root does not have a
> password, then *any activity on the system* can gain root privileges
> by su'ing to root.  By restricting 'root login' to the olpc user via
> sudo, it becomes simple to restrict the activities which can gain root
> privileges, because our security system runs activities as their own
> UIDs.  This is the key difference in using sudo, not whether the root
> account is 'well known', etc etc.
>  --scott
>
> --
>                          ( http://cscott.net/ )
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