> Message: 1
> Date: Fri, 9 Jul 2004 09:55:40 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Roger Marquis <marquis@roble.com>
> Subject: Re: Root users shell == no existant shell /bin/bash
> To: freebsd-security@freebsd.org
> Message-ID: <20040709165540.2799D2C1CC@mx5.roble.com>
> Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
> "Peter C. Lai" wrote:
> > as a rule of thumb, you're probably superuser way too much if you
> > develop an urge to change it shell anyway.
> Where do people come up with these folk "rules"? I spend all day
> working in various root shells as part of my job. Couldn't do it
> otherwise.
> > toor has a disabled (*) password by default. What Brannon
> > should have done was set a password for toor in the beginning,
> > without mucking around with root's shell.
> In 8 years of BSD administration I've never seen the toor
> account used. IMO, as a matter of security, KIS, and for
> improved cross-platform compatibility it should be removed from
> the distribution.
I've used it a few times. Since about 1996 I've used the ksh
as the default root shell on all Unix systems I've admined -
commercial distributions and FreeBSD. I also set up the
commericial Unixen to same way FreeBSD does, with /root being
the owners home directory instead of /. It's one more little
thing that can help prevent a mistype from removing critical files,
by accident, or if there is more than one person with root access.
Having *toor* with the default /bin/sh came in handy.
Something in the gnu tools had changed and I was having a bizarre
failure on building a port. Logging out and back in under
*toor* showed there was an incompatibility between the current
Gnu approach and the ksh I was running. A quick upgrade
to the current sources from AT&T/David Korn fixed that.
Having an alternate and simple shell can be handy.
I've not had to use toor very often. And I've used the
live-CD - #2 CD - twice. But it was a lifesaver both times.
I moved the ISP I was working for in 1995 completely off
the SGI Challenge servers and the multi $K netscape commercial
product to FreeBSD and Apache in 1996. Far more speed on
platforms that weren't as powerful.
I don't see anything more insecure with having both a root and toor
account. And I've had exactly ONE security breech. I had missed
ONE machine on a telnet upgrade - late 1990s. I caught it within
hours ot the daily security email. I keep them as tight as I can
as I'm on a 10Gbps backbone - but I've never removed toor.
But that's just my approach.
Bill
--
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com
