On Aug 5, 2005, at 6:27 PM, Robert Himmelmann wrote:
Jim Cheetham wrote:
lol. "sudo su" is almost pointless ... "sudo -s" gives you a root
shell :-)
Ok, I do not have much experience with sudo and typing 'u' is for me
easier than '-'.
:-) agreed. Functionally they are very similar - in internal detail
they are very different. Most of the time people are interested only in
functionality ...
I commented everything in /etc/sudoers. I do not like sudo. Normally
two thirds of the commands I use I do as root.
Then, remove sudo. If you have disabled it like that, why not remove it
completely?
(One answer - because distribution dependancies might try to prevent
you. The answer to that might be Slackware or Linux From Scratch)
One of my friends used to do everything on his laptop as the root user.
After all, he owned the machine, didn't he?
(There's no downside to the story. He never made a costly mistake ;-)
Yes, he's that good).
It's up to you how hackable you leave your system. :-)
I can rely on security through obsurity. By modifing the keyboard
layout for my own needs I have made it very difficult to use for
anyone else. The only problem with this is that it is difficult for me
to use any computer on which I have not copied that layout.
I've supported so many different systems that I've instead become able
to use the most default system to do my job. Even on a machine that I
expect to use for years, I make very few changes. If you heavily
customise your machine, I advise you to also make sure that you can
copy and re-apply those essential customisations to a default machine,
quickly ;-) It's worth spending a bit of time generalising your setup,
because if you get a new stock machine, it will take you much longer
when you really need to get it done. I think that's some variation on
the laws of thermodynamics ... ;-)
nmap shows that I have only one open port which is ssh and which I
disable when I do not need it.
Unless you are explicitly asking nmap to probe every port, be aware
that it only usually scans a few thousand likely target port numbers by
default. Better to use netstat or the excellent "lsof -i TCP" and "lsof
-i UDP" to say what ports you really do have open.
*cough* same friend as above - always disables ports he doesn't need.
He plugged his laptop into my network this afternoon ... I nmapped him.
One open port - distccd. Hmmm ... he's a gentoo user, that's why he has
distcc running. Google says ...
http://www.metasploit.com/projects/Framework/exploits.html#distcc_exec
http://distcc.samba.org/security.html
<quote>The server completely trusts an authorized client. A malicious
client could execute arbitrary commands on the server.</quote>
Perhaps he isn't that good after all?
:-)
Like I said, "It's up to you how hackable you leave your system".
Choose any two from these three - "security", "functionality",
"complexity".
-jim
