Hello friends,
Original poster first:
> Hello managers,
>
> What are the pro's and con's of changing the shell for the root
account
> in /etc/passwd? The default /bin/sh is rather limited for interactive
> usage, and typing "ksh -o emacs" in every starting session is
annoying.
> The compelling choice is: change the root's shell to /bin/ksh, but is
it
> a good idea?
>
> I will post a summary of your thoughts, opinions, comments, etc...
>
> Thank you!
Please don't shoot me! Nearly 3 weeks passed since my poster of this
question. Seems like everything here went wild at the same moment...
I'm calling this a partial summary because I suspect some replies from
you guys never reached my mailbox. Our mail administrator (a typical NT
guy ;-) decided to *shut down* mail reception for the whole company for
2 days when news of the "Melissa Virus" reached his ears. He also did a
few "minor adjustments" to our mail server that actually had the
disastrous effect of losing 2 days worth of my e-mail. Crudely put,
the NT equivalent of ln -s /dev/null /var/spool/mail/vacch2. This
happened the day after I posted my question to Tru64-unix-managers.
Grrrrr!
If you replied but you are not listed below, your response was lost.
Would you be king enough to resend me your reply. I will gladly repost a
summary if new information is resent.
So, thanks to the following people for their replies:
Bryan Rank <bryan_at_compgen.com>
Jim Belonis <belonis_at_dirac.phys.washington.edu>
Ray DeJean <ray_at_selu.edu>
"Paul Chapman" <pchapman_at_davidjones.com.au>
As usual when opinions are seeked, responses vary widely. Here is what I
got so far:
------------------------
Bryan:
My .02
Make certain that whatever shell you use is in /bin, not /usr/bin.
Don't use a link. That way if you have to boot into single user,
you still have a shell.
P.S. If you have one big / that included /usr, (i.e. your usr is on
your root partition, then it doesn't matter, as long as you shell is
accessible when only / is mounted.
------------------------
Jim:
You can change the root account's INTERACTIVE shell to ksh safely if you
want.
But I wouldn't change the shell used by daemons and cron jobs.
e.g. maybe put lines similar to this might work
f ( $?prompt ) then
set history = 100
set cdpath = (~)
alias ls-l 'ls -l'
alias ls 'ls -CA'
exec /bin/ksh
endif
but I just manually type
exec csh
after I login.
------------------------
Ray:
I have changed my root shell to tcsh, and haven't seen any major
problems.
The biggest problem is the 'vipw' command is no longer usable, it just
says 'you mangled the passwd file, changes aborted' or something to that
effect. Since i rarely used vipw anyway, it is not a big deal.
------------------------
Paul:
Using root as a login shell is not a good idea in its own right.
May I suggest using your own admin account, and then using su or sudo
when
you must be root.
------------------------
===============================================
Charles Vachon tel: (418) 627-6355 x2760
email: cvachon2_at_mrn.gouv.qc.ca
Administrateur de système
FRCQ/Ministère des Ressources
Naturelles du Québec
===============================================
Received on Tue Apr 20 1999 - 02:15:47 NZST