Friday, January 05, 2007

What's the root Password?

I tried to su to root to change permissions on a file. When the system prompted me for a password, I realized I had never set one during installation. Did I miss something? Was I sleeping during the installation?

I looked through the Ubuntu forum, www.ubuntux.org and quickly found the following information. A new user asked the same question on the forum and of course, someone quickly pointed the guy in the right direction with a link, but they piled on the typical advice, "Too lazy to look around for yourself?" That's pretty typical with forums.

Anyway, default Ubuntu does not have a root password set.

"su" is not the command to get to root. Instead, I had to type:

sudo passwd

The system prompted me for my password, then it wanted a new password for root. I set one, a complex one and I was off to work again.

Next, I need to install a firewall. I see that Firestarter is the one to use.

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