On Wed, Mar 25, 2015 at 09:20:53AM -0400, Hendrik Boom wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 25, 2015 at 05:56:34AM +0200, Martijn Dekkers wrote:
> > There are no significant *security* implications when running as root if
> > you mostly use linux as a server OS. Simply banging "sudo" in from of most
> > of your commands doesn't help you at all when it comes to security. There
> > is a small benefit in not having the root account having a password, in the
> > sense that everybody knows that there must be a root account on your
> > machine, so that becomes an immediate target for every cracker with a
> > rainbow table and some sort of shell access.
>
> Are there any drawbacks to naming the root account something other
> than 'root'? Perhaps by editing /etc/password and /etc/shadow? And, of
> course, renaming /root correspondingly?

Mainly that some software (a few shell scripts for the most part) checks
for root via a string comparison of "$USER" with "root", which is of
course utterly wrong.
And some scripts or such might use "su root" or similar things that
explicitly use the root account.

But on the whole it "Should Work Fine" (TM); no warranty provided and if
you do it, you're on your own. ;-)

HTH,
Isaac Dunham