"John M. Brown" wrote: > > I have question for the security community on NANOG.
I confess that I think of NANOG as not being a security community, rather it is a group of north american network operators. That said, you can find all sorts of info for the somewhat naive question below by a slightly judicious use of our friend, Google. That said, and since I'm avoiding work that I SHOULD be doing, I will answer your Important question. > What is your learned opinion of having host accounts > (unix machines) with UID/GID of 0:0 This shows a certain naivet�, and suggests that you have not heard of truly useful tools such as sudo. If it's UNIX, sudo builds. Why is this a bad thing? The first number in your password entry implies USER. Not users. There is simply no way to tell which of many multiples of people might have made a change in your system, since the UID is the same for all. > otherwords > > jmbrown_r:password:0:0:John M. Brown:/export/home/jmbrown:/bin/mysh I also truly hope that this was just a quick copy by you, and that you are not truly discussing a system here that allows the password file to actually contain the password. Please tell me that your password file is at least shadowed, and that was just a typo. > The argument is that way you don't hav to give out the root password, > you can just nuke a users UID=0 equiv account when the leave and not > have to change the real root account. I will also supply you with a bit of advice, one that I see even using SSH over the network to my own machines: "Don't login as root, use su" > Now, don't flame me over the question, but provide valid pro's or con's > for this practice from your experience. There are no positive aspects to this practice. I suggest that you get the wonderful red book (now colored purple, last I recall) by Evi Nemeth et al, and study it thoroughly. I now return you to the discussion on (wireless and other) security, how much is too much, and so on. -- ...some sort of steganographic chaffing and winnowing scheme already exists in practice right here: I frequently find myself having to sort through large numbers of idiotic posts to find the good ones. -- Rufus Faloofus
