[Discuss] pulse files in /tmp on RHEL 6 - followup

[bogstad at pobox.com (Bill Bogstad)]

On Sat, Mar 21, 2015 at 4:11 PM, Bill Ricker <bill.n1vux at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 21, 2015 at 8:02 AM, Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org> wrote:
>> The root passwords on
>> these systems were expired and this prevents cron from executing on a
>> user with an expired password.
>
> Ouch. Yet another reason to avoid having 'root' have a password.
>
> Is it even possible to configure RH for root to a UID but not an
> interactive account, like in Ubuntu ?

In what sense is root not an interactive account on Ubuntu?   The
shell entry for
root is an interactive shell.   Ubuntu simply doesn't give root a password which
can be used to login and makes sure that a non-root user name can sudo
to root.   I believe there are other things as well, but those are the
basic differences.
You could do the same thing manually on any relatively modern Linux system.

The really interesting thing for me here is how our modern world of
PAM authentication
interacts with things that I don't normally think requires
authentication.   When I saw
Jerry's original note, I did some googling and found that this can
cause problems with
ssh key-only logins as well.   If you look at /etc/pam.d, it seems
lots of programs use
PAM for authorization/authentication and I suspect that there are
other surprises waiting there.

Bill Bogstad