Technically you don't need the root password, you can always password recovery if you have access to the box. And how exactly did you lock yourself out of ever

Technically you don't need the root password, you can always password recovery if you have access to the box. And how exactly did you lock yourself out of every account with sudo? Of course there's always "messed up my ldap or general network settings, can't log in to fix them". There's nothing wrong with setting your root password to a random string and throwing it away, after verifying your sudo works, I guess. I will admit to being lazy, and with full automation its faster to spawn a new virtual image and let ansible run its course than to do root password recovery where you boot and tell the bootloader to make the init system /bin/sh and hand edit /etc/shadow and /etc/passwd and then reboot again, etc etc. I mean I can set up a new image almost as fast as I can reboot an old image, and I set up images a lot more often than I do password recovery, so... Scrap the ssh commentary and set up ssh company wide as per stribika plus or minus local modifications: https://stribika.github.io/2015/01/04/secure-secure-shell.html https://stribika.github.io/2015/01/04/secure-secure-shell.ht... "On large scale, you'll be better off with a full automated setup using something like Ansible" At ANY scale you're better off, unless you're experimenting or time isn't money. It'll take longer to add the time to document and test what you're doing by hand than to convince ansible to do it for you. If you don't document or test you're just doomed, so its not like you can avoid that effort. With automation this is like "first two minutes on a server" not ten. Some people like to drop a .forward in root's homedir sending mail to your sysadmin mailing list or yourself. I THINK but might be wrong that if you do that you don't have to tell logwatch whom to email to, it'll go to root then forward to the right people. More than logwatch assumes root@something.whatever exists as an email address. You're missing setting up your centralized rsyslog or local equivalent, your munin/nagios/zabbix or local equivalent... I still configure zabbix by hand because I'm old fashioned but its possible to automate that. NTP is also missing. You can make Kerberos a very sad faced puppy if time isn't synced. And its easy to set up to point to local trusted servers. (Note, a post that's nothing but complaining still means the linked article is at least 99.9% correct, it is a nicely written wide ranging TODO list)