🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <uij5h2g@zuni.esd.sgi.com> olson@anchor.esd.sgi.com (Dave Olson) writes:
>
>I maintain (and a number of people disagree with me), that you *have*
>to ship an open root, and given that, anybody who can't scan a 
>*15 line* password file to notice the other accounts that have no
>passwords is unlikely to do anything about root either.  If they
>don't secure root, nothing else matters.  We can start all of these
>arguments all over again, but I maintain (both as a system admin in
>a number of environments, and as a tech support resource in 4 compainies)
>that we would be *crazy* as a company to do anything else.

With all due respect, Dave, I have to disagree here. Most people are
sensible enough to protect root, but either aren't aware of the other
open accounts or put off learning how to protect them without giving up
the ability to share resources over the network (like remote printers,
etc.). People buy systems to solve problems, and many sites (like ours)
don't have full-time system administrators. The people who set up the
systems aren't idiots, they're expected to set the systems up and then
go back to writing proposals. Learning about security issues gets put
on the back burner along with getting system software upgraded, getting
clocks synched to a reliable source, diagnosing network slowdowns...

>As has been discussed here every time this has come up (and as Vernon
>mentioned in this same thread), the best thing would be to have a script
>that runs after install, similarly to the autoconfig and confmsg scripts,
>that asks the user if they want to setup a secure system, and walks them
>through it in a script.  That may still happen for a future release.

Excellent idea. How far in the future are we talking about?

------
Dale Atems
Wayne State University, Detroit, MI
Department of Physics and Astronomy
atems@igor.physics.wayne.edu