[Freeipa-users] Administration question: root user

[Joe Linoff]

Thank you. I really appreciate your help and for taking the time to answer so quickly.

I will NOT manage root through FreeIPA.

Regards,

Joe

-----Original Message-----
From: Stephen Gallagher [mailto:sgallagh at redhat.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, June 06, 2012 7:15 AM
To: Joe Linoff
Cc: freeipa-users at redhat.com
Subject: Re: [Freeipa-users] Administration question: root user

On Wed, 2012-06-06 at 06:59 -0700, Joe Linoff wrote:
> Hi Folks:
> 
>  
> 
> I am a newbie so I apologize in advance if this is a silly set of 
> questions. I am using FreeIPA 2.1.3 on CentOS 6.2 and am very happy 
> with it but I have a couple of questions about root access. When I 
> setup my systems, I configured root manually on each of them.
> 
>  
> 
> Does it make sense to define the root user in FreeIPA?

No, this is unsafe. You always want to be able to log in locally as root if something goes wrong. We specifically exclude 'root' from being managed by SSSD for this reason.

> 
>  
> 
> Is it desirable from a security and administration perspective? 

Absolutely not. Your better bet would be to maintain SUDO rules on each of the systems instead.

> 
>  
> 
> If it does make sense, is it as simple as adding the “root” user in 
> “ipa user-add”?

Please don't :)