[TriLUG] Rant: VISTA OMG PLEASE SHOOT ME

[Owen]

On Sun, Sep 09, 2007 at 11:48:31AM -0400, Andy wrote:
> > So security pro's and cons.
> > But I was talking about a desktop system, not a server farm, and there
> > having just sudo and no root, and the sudo password being the same as
> > the user's one which is the ubuntu default, is a sacrifice in security
> > that is hard to justify in my opinion.
> > I just prefer it differently, and these are my reasons. Honestly, I
> > might be completely wrong about this (ubuntu could have changed this
> > since my last experience with it), if so feel free to correct me. It's
> > my opinion based upon my experiences, nothing more. Hell, as you said
> > I might be behind the times.
> >
> >   
> Sudo == bad because you pick bad passwords?  Install a password checker 
> that forbids this for multi-user systems.

The point, as I understood it, was more like: 1 password to get root
access is going to be less secure than 2 passwords. Makes sense to me -
you can't ssh as root into my box, so you need to get a user's password
as well as root's, and the user has to be one that has rights to su to
root. On a box that has sudo to everything setup, all you need is my
password.

On this topic of desktops, periodically I've tried running Xfce on both
Gentoo and Fedora desktops, and it was faster and lighter than Gnome.
However, I found myself using core Gnome applications in some
situations, and in the end I don't think it was noticeably faster
anymore. Did I miss something?  Maybe I've just been using Gnome for too
long. Seems like there are still core Xfce specifc apps being developed
and the platform needs to mature. Unless all you run is an xterm and
firefox, in which case you may as well run something really light as you
really don't need the extra functionality of Gnome/KDE/Xfce.

Owen