Ultimately Safe User Account

[Andrew]

Dan Rue wrote:

> A live CD is a good suggestion.
>
> I have to disagree with the idea behind this whole thing, though.  I
> mean, if this guy's really your friend, I don't see what you're so
> worried about.  It's really pretty tough to 'accidently' break things
as
> a user on a system, as long as the system is moderately well
> administered.
>
> If you're concerned about him using a bad password, give him a
> sufficient warning and run john the ripper against your password file
> for a couple of days.
>
> Also, don't allow any clear-text protocols such as samba, ftp, telnet,
> etc etc.
>
> Dang, man, I had a friend that ran an /open/ shell server in high
> school.  He had over 100,000 users, and didn't get hacked (well, he
did
> at first, but that's when he was running linux :) ).
>
> How's he supposed to learn anything if all you give him is a jail with
> ls cp mv sh and vi?  sheesh.  That'll turn him off unix pretty quick.


Thanks for your feedback. I guess I'll just let him in and try not to
worry. Well, the trouble is that I am the one administering the box and
that it was this summer when I started reading heaps of unix/bsd
documentation - for the first time in my life. I'm still paranoid about
my own actions, not to mention smb's else. I'll give him cygwin/livecd
as well, though.


Thanks again!

Regards,
Andrew P.