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Frankly, I find it suspect that they even suggest having a root password. The only situation where this is useful is when sudo is somehow broken (e.g. a typo i
by amalcon 11y ago
Frankly, I find it suspect that they even suggest having a root password. The only situation where this is useful is when sudo is somehow broken (e.g. a typo in /etc/sudoers). This happens rarely enough that I'm OK with a more heavyweight process (like booting Knoppix) to fix it.
- mjevans 11y agoIt's the annoying times when your system forces you in to single user mode for repairs, and you have to enter something... or else boot up a rescue disk (the proper solution) to fix it, that make having a root password at all a sometimes good idea. Really though, that rescue disk sounds like a better idea every time I think about the situation.
- yellowapple 11y agoDepending on the breakage (e.g. if your initrd got borked), you'll probably need the rescue disk anyway in order to have access to the necessary tools to activate RAID arrays, decrypt disks, activate LVM VGs, etc. Even without, IIRC, Ubuntu (one of the few systems that actually gets root passwords right by defaulting to it being randomly-generated garbage that nobody knows) will prompt for the credentials of a sudo-capable user even for single-user mode.