Superuser password lost

[Jerry McAllister]

On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 10:14:32PM -0400, Bill Moran wrote:

> 
> Because I don't think it's appropriate to drag this conversation on
> and on, I'm going to try to answer all the responses in a single
> email.
> 
> Jerry McAllister <jerrymc at msu.edu> wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 11:27:36AM -0400, Bill Moran wrote:
> > 
> [snip]
> > > 
> > > No.  The term "superuser" is a made-up term for any way of gaining
> > > root privs.  In my experience it's confusing as there are two
> > > commonly used methods for doing this, the su command and sudo, and
> > > they require different passwords.
> > 
> > I have never seen the term used that way.
> > 
> > I have seen su and sudo referred to as ways of a non-root id gaining 
> > superuser priviledge/root priviledge but not a superuser as someone who 
> > is not root, but has a method of gaining root priviledge.
> 
> Apparently I miscommunicated.  My point was that the OP's message used
> the term "superuser" in an ambiguous way. (i.e. the way I mentioned).
> To me, it wasn't clear what it was asking for, and thus sending the OP
> to the PC-BSD community (where folks are probably familiar to the
> GUI widget he's dealing with) seemed the best thing to do.

I don't really care, but when I read the OP, I believed he was
looking for root from what was presented and so that was how I
responded.   The rest is just small talk.    But, asking the PC-BSD
folk is not a bad idea.

////jerry

> ...
> ...

> 
> Alex Zbyslaw <xfb52 at dial.pipex.com> wrote:
> > 
> > I'd contend that the su manpage *should* say root not superuser, since 
> > root is hardwired as the default.  But for other cases, any user with 
> > UID 0 might work just as well (e.g. toor).
> 
> I agree on this point, but not enough to bother trying to put a patch
> together that (based on the conversation here) is likely to be
> controversial.
> 
> -- 
> Bill Moran
> http://www.potentialtech.com
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