[OpenIndiana-discuss] User roles and acting as root

[David Brodbeck]

On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 11:53 AM, Ken Gunderson <kgunders at teamcool.net>wrote:

> On a boxes where I, or one or two others I know and trust, are the only
> admin(s), I find sudo a complete pita and never use it.  When I want
> root it's because I need to get something done and sudo just gets in my
> way and adds unnecessary typing w/o any benefit - if I'm going to make a
> typo or brain fart so bad as to blow up the box, sudo is not going to
> save me.  Much better to actually have a # in your prompt and adhere to
> the old sysadmin adage of sitting on your hands for 5 seconds before
> hitting enter...
>

Hm.  For me it's the opposite; I now use sudo almost exclusively on my home
boxes, and rarely su to root.  Part of it is I've come to rely heavily on
command history and command recall, and having to start all over with an
empty history (and, if I'm doing "su -", chdir back to the right working
directory) is a hassle.  Some of the OS's I work with (FreeBSD, in
particular) have very basic statically-linked shells for root, in order to
make system recovery easier, and these often lack good tab-completion and
command history features.

-- 
David Brodbeck
System Administrator, Linguistics
University of Washington