November 19, 2009, 2:56 pm
A hotly debated topic this week has been a decision made with the latest release of Fedora. The 12th release has made it so that local users can install signed packages from the repositories, without root access.
You can read all the nerd-rage here:
Fedora 12 allows any user to install software on a machine without the root password. Drama on the mailing list.
Oddly enough they didn’t see this important enough to include on the release notes. Some will argue this is not much of an issue, well I would ask you to consider this security breach of the Fedora signing servers a little more than a year ago:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2008-August/msg00012.html
With that taken into consideration, this is a pretty big deal.
Jeff Garzik’s replies seem to be the most eloquent arguments for reverting to the F11 security posture, in case anyone here thinks this change is a good thing:
Now for what this blog usually does, which is gives more solutions than commentary, here is how you fix your Fedora 12’s broken security model:
Simply run:
pklalockdown –lockdown org.freedesktop.packagekit.package-install
This will re-enable the old (better) behavior for installing signed packages with a known key. Once this is done your Fedora 12 will no longer be on par with Windows98, enjoy.
November 4, 2008, 9:22 am
If you forget the root password and you cannot log into the system, you will have to do the following:
Continue reading ‘What to do if you lost the root password in Solaris 9-10’ »
August 17, 2008, 11:24 am
How do I change MySQL root password under Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and UNIX like operating system over ssh / telnet session?
Setting up mysql password is one of the essential tasks. root user is MySQL admin account. Please note that Linux / UNIX login root account for your operating system and MySQL root are different. They are separate and nothing to do with each other (indeed some admin removes root account and setup admin as mysql super user).
Continue reading ‘Change the root password for mysql’ »
July 26, 2008, 9:28 am
I’ve been answering a lot of support threads lately wherein users have said they are unable to empty the trash can because a file in there is owned by root or they cannot get a Firefox setting change to stick (and it turns out their Firefox settings folder is owned by root).
Do you know where this comes from, why this is happening?
Bad advice. It all comes from bad advice.
The follow hopes to counter that.
Continue reading ‘A reminder about the proper way to invoke root in Ubuntu’ »
May 20, 2008, 5:41 pm
To have a service menu which opens the selected directory as root in Konqueror, create a file, say konq_root.desktop in ~/.kde/share/apps/konqueror/servicemenus with the following content:
[Desktop Entry]
ServiceTypes=inode/directory
Actions=open_as_root
[Desktop Action open_as_root]
Name=Open as Root
Icon=konsole
Exec=kdesu konqueror %F
Now, if you right click any directory in Konqueror and go to Actions, a new menu appears, Open as Root. If you select more than one directory, Konqueror will open each of them in a new tab.
