On Wed, Jul 9, 2008 at 6:43 PM, Don Montalvo <donmontalvo@mac.com> wrote:

Shawn Erickson <shawnce@gmail.com> wrote:

...

You should never need to enable the root account on Mac OS X.

At the sake of starting another UNIX holy war......why not?

Note I very clearly said "you should never need to enable" not "you should never enable" however one could sensibly argue for the later. Any user that is given administrative rights on the system (check box in account preferences) has the ability to use sudo to execute privileged commands using their own account password (unless the default configuration for sudo is modified to not allow this). Also any graphical tool that needs privileges should utilize authorization services and launchd to fire up a utility, etc. that carry out the privileged operation. In other words the user just needs to authenticate they don't need to login in as root. If you want non-admin users to have sudo ability you can modify the sudoers file to allow specific users or secondary groups to use sudo by providing the user name and password of an account that does have administrative rights. The root account on Mac OS X is generally meant to be an account for use by the OS itself and not one that you would normally login as (aka the system doesn't allow login as root by default). -Shawn