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Special Forums Cybersecurity Root login in Linux - does it make sense? Post 302728083 by Corona688 on Wednesday 7th of November 2012 10:26:19 AM
Old 11-07-2012
I think you've taken my position a little farther than I've meant it. I do login as root on occasion. I just don't allow root to login externally. That's what sudo's for -- it gives you the same thing in a less blunt, more careful way.
Quote:
Originally Posted by bakunin
Still, apart from private usage there is the corporate usage of Linux systems. Administrating up to several hundreds of (maybe virtualized) Linux systems typically involves carrying out one command on several or all systems in parallel. If i want to know which systems have a certain package/version combination installed I'd issue some rpm-command on all systems, for instance, to find out which systems need a certain update.
If you allow 'sudo su -' you might as well allow sudo to do other things since you have zero effective restrictions anyway. I have one sudo-enabled user that I use for administrative things. So you're left with the enormous hassle of 5 extra keystrokes per command.

Granted, I have made that particular user very difficult to get to via anything but ssh keys. The keys themselves are password protected, too. I login once in the morning, ssh-agent, and have access to my servers throughout the day.

Sometimes I'll push a job into root's cron table if I really need to run an awful lot of root commands.
 

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GETCPU(2)						     Linux Programmer's Manual							 GETCPU(2)

NAME
getcpu - determine CPU and NUMA node on which the calling thread is running SYNOPSIS
#include <linux/getcpu.h> int getcpu(unsigned *cpu, unsigned *node, struct getcpu_cache *tcache); DESCRIPTION
The getcpu() system call identifies the processor and node on which the calling thread or process is currently running and writes them into the integers pointed to by the cpu and node arguments. The processor is a unique small integer identifying a CPU. The node is a unique small identifier identifying a NUMA node. When either cpu or node is NULL nothing is written to the respective pointer. The third argument to this system call is nowadays unused. The information placed in cpu is only guaranteed to be current at the time of the call: unless the CPU affinity has been fixed using sched_setaffinity(2), the kernel might change the CPU at any time. (Normally this does not happen because the scheduler tries to minimize movements between CPUs to keep caches hot, but it is possible.) The caller must be prepared to handle the situation when cpu and node are no longer the current CPU and node. VERSIONS
getcpu() was added in kernel 2.6.19 for x86_64 and i386. CONFORMING TO
getcpu() is Linux specific. NOTES
Linux makes a best effort to make this call as fast possible. The intention of getcpu() is to allow programs to make optimizations with per-CPU data or for NUMA optimization. Glibc does not provide a wrapper for this system call; call it using syscall(2); or use sched_getcpu(3) instead. The tcache argument is unused since Linux 2.6.24. In earlier kernels, if this argument was non-NULL, then it specified a pointer to a caller-allocated buffer in thread-local storage that was used to provide a caching mechanism for getcpu(). Use of the cache could speed getcpu() calls, at the cost that there was a very small chance that the returned information would be out of date. The caching mechanism was considered to cause problems when migrating threads between CPUs, and so the argument is now ignored. SEE ALSO
mbind(2), sched_setaffinity(2), set_mempolicy(2), sched_getcpu(3), cpuset(7) COLOPHON
This page is part of release 3.25 of the Linux man-pages project. A description of the project, and information about reporting bugs, can be found at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/. Linux 2008-06-03 GETCPU(2)
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