From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Dec 31 22: 4:29 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mail8.nc.rr.com (fe8.southeast.rr.com [24.93.67.55]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1EC7637B426 for ; Mon, 31 Dec 2001 22:04:27 -0800 (PST) Received: from there ([66.57.85.154]) by mail8.nc.rr.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(5.5.1877.687.68); Tue, 1 Jan 2002 01:04:25 -0500 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" From: Brian T.Schellenberger To: Rogier Steehouder , FreeBSD-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Can I rename root? Date: Tue, 1 Jan 2002 01:03:46 -0500 X-Mailer: KMail [version 1.3] References: <20011229154552.B855@localhost> <20011230103317.A474@localhost> <20011231154733.A832@localhost> In-Reply-To: <20011231154733.A832@localhost> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Message-ID: <06d462504060112FE8@mail8.nc.rr.com> Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG root has been the name of the admin account on Unix systems for many years now, at least least going back to the 70's and I presume to the earliest days (though I don't go back *quite* that far with Unix). It is a certainty that many scripts and programs use "root" explicitly by name and if you eliminate root you will run into trouble. Perhaps this is "wrong" but I promise you it will occur. If you want to log in as admin, I'd suggest just vipw, copy the root line to admin, thus creating two different user *names* for the single user *id* 0. This shouldn't cause any trouble (though vipw might complain about it). You can log in as admin and the all the programs out there can call you root and everybody should be happy. -- Brian T. Schellenberger . . . . . . . bts@wnt.sas.com (work) Brian, the man from Babble-On . . . . bts@babbleon.org (personal) http://www.babbleon.org -------> Free Dmitry Sklyarov! (let him go home) <----------- http://www.eff.org http://www.programming-freedom.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message