Date: Sun, 16 Mar 2008 00:03:07 -0800 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "Bill Moran" <wmoran@potentialtech.com>, "freebsd-questions" <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: RE: Superuser password lost Message-ID: <BMEDLGAENEKCJFGODFOCMEHNCFAA.tedm@toybox.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <20080312221432.ff2fd465.wmoran@potentialtech.com>
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> -----Original Message----- > From: owner-freebsd-questions@freebsd.org > [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Bill Moran > Sent: Wednesday, March 12, 2008 6:15 PM > To: freebsd-questions > Subject: Re: Superuser password lost > > > > Apparently I miscommunicated. My point was that the OP's message used > the term "superuser" in an ambiguous way. (i.e. the way I mentioned). > To me, it wasn't clear what it was asking for, and thus sending the OP > to the PC-BSD community (where folks are probably familiar to the > GUI widget he's dealing with) seemed the best thing to do. > Historically on all UNIXes "superuser" = "the root user" The problem as I see it is that recently Apple (probably stole this idea from someone else) has introduced ambiguity into the term with the creation of what they call the "owner" account into MacOS X. With regular MacOS X there's some things that an ordinary user can do, but when an ordinary user tries to do some other things, MacOS X flashes up a dialog asking for the owners password. However, even if you su to root, there's still things that the system will not let you do which is insane because real UNIX will happily allow the root user to rm -r / if desired. Once more, proving that MacOS X is nothing more than UNIX-on-training-wheels, and reaffirming what Apple's historic view of it's customers really is (ie: dumb and dumber) Microsoft also introduced ambiguity into the concept, although to their credit, they scruplously avoided use of the term "superuser" or "root". Under Microsoft operating systems, there's ordinary users and there's "administrators" and you can have multiple administrators, which isn't possible in UNIX - thus a MS administrator <> a UNIX superuser. I would suspect PC-BSD has copied the Apple nonsense and has created this mutated account that's not quite a real superuser account, and not quite a regular user account. Ted
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