root password required for basic troubleshooting

[Chris Murphy]

On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 3:23 PM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <znmeb at znmeb.net> wrote:

> 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.

That is true, the admin checkbox isn't checked by default in the
installer, but I think gnome-initial-setup adds the user to wheel.
g-i-s only comes up if a user wasn't created in the installer. This is
consistent with Windows and OS X too, the first user is an admin.

>
> I'd go that route - require a root password but give the user the
> option to copy the administrator password to 'root'.

I think this is reasonable for Workstation, but I'm also really anti
forcing users to follow password rules for root. So as long as tying
the first user password to root doesn't then cause ridiculous security
theater rules to be enforced on the user, great. Again as point of
reference Windows and OS X don't have such limitations. I think it's
fine to warn the user if their password is a dictionary word or
whatever best practices is for warnings. I would sooner consider it
more appropriate if the UI were to resort to name calling than
enforcing specific password rules.


-- 
Chris Murphy