root password required for basic troubleshooting

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 12:48 PM, Chris Murphy <lists at colorremedies.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> In Fedora 20 and 21, the installer doesn't require setting the root
> password. Yet systemd in both requires a root password to do anything,
> including basic boot time troubleshooting, in both rescue.target and
> emergency.target.
>
> If the user is dropped to an emergency shell at boot, and are referred
> to rdsosreport.txt, they can't do anything if they haven't set a root
> password. And if they need to do a password reset, they're stuck also.
>
> Questions
>
> Is this the intended and desired UX for Workstation?
>
> If not, what policy change is most practical? Requiring the user set a
> root password, or somehow enabling systemd emergency.target to accept
> a non-root user in group wheel?

It's been a while since I installed openSUSE but my recollection is
that the default is to set the root password to the same value as the
user password. You can uncheck that and use another password. Also,
the non-root user is *not* in the 'wheel' group by default IIRC.

I'd go that route - require a root password but give the user the
option to copy the administrator password to 'root'.
>
> Points of comparison
>
> Windows has a burdensome password reset method, but it does offer
> startup repair environments that don't require a password. OS X has a
> safe boot option, as well as a separate recovery environment, also
> without requiring a password, and a password reset can be done within
> this environment.
>
>
>
> --
> Chris Murphy
> --
> desktop mailing list
> desktop at lists.fedoraproject.org
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop



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