F10 and no root login - impossible to maintain systems!

[Casey Dahlin]

Benjamin LaHaise wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 03:49:09PM +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>   
>> Benjamin LaHaise wrote:
>>     
>>> On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 08:29:33AM +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>>>       
>>>> You can at run level 3. You can even start X after that.
>>>>         
>>> You're assuming all users of a system are technical.  That is not the case.
>>>       
>> Non technical users shouldn't be logging in as root and more so X. They 
>> should be either launching graphical programs that ask for a password or 
>> use su - or sudo. It an potentially be made easier by giving them a 
>> "administrator shell" or something like that in the menu which launches 
>> the terminal and asks for a root/sudo password but it would be better to 
>> understand why it is ever needed and solve that issue in a perhaps more 
>> elegant way.
>>     
>
> And how do you propose that a user login to fix a problem when they call 
> tech support saying "I get a blank screen when I login"?   I'm curious, 
> because these are real world cases where the GUI login fails.  By disallowing 
> root logins, there is no way to fix that short of rebooting the system to 
> even narrow down what the problem is.  Even then, with F10 using a 0 second 
> wait at the grub prompt, it's almost impossible to catch grub in time to 
> specify the runlevel or init=/bin/sh.
>
>   
Ctrl+Alt+F2

--CJD