On 8/30/06, McKown, John <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

If I were doing this in a business environment, I would insist on
digital certs and not even allow the use of passwords (and disable
telnet as well, for that matter). That would only leave logging in via
the "console" under z/VM and/or the "HMC Integrated ASCII terminal" for
non-SSH logins. I actually run z/Linux under Hercules/390 for my

In my former life we had inittab automatically logon root on the VM
console, so that was protected by z/VM RACF and LOGONBY (and SCIF ...)
And we used sudo without password to issue privileged commands from
our personal account (access via cryptic keys). So nobody needed a
root password and there was no risk of someone else finding and using
it.
Unfortunately the auditors required that we set a root password and
change it every now and then. Which means there *is* a root password
and someone might find it, and we're off worse than without. Sigh.

The same silly discussion applied to personal accounts but we stopped
fighting that. Fortunately the ssh logon with crypic keys does not
honor the account being "locked" so we could simply lock all other
accounts and not bother with expiring passwords.

Rob

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