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Brodie Robertson
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Comments by "" (@dingokidneys) on "Systemd Wants To Replace Your Sudo!?!" video.
The 'man' page is 571 lines long. It does a lot that a single person on a single laptop/desktop does not need, as Brodie said. It allows for fine grained control over user access to privileged resources which is great on a multi-user supercomputer on a research or educational campus but kinda overkill for a dude on his lappy.
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From the posting in the video, it looks like a wrapper around systemd-run which as you say is functionality that has been there a long time. My first reaction was "Oh, no!" but as the explanation went on I thought "This sounds pretty reasonable actually." Lennart seems to be one of those people who is (painfully for me) right about what he says. Sadly, I'll probably have to learn some new stuff; more about systemd and a bit about polkit.
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@THEMithrandir09 As I understand from the posting in the video, it's almost a wrapper for systemd-run so all the weighty stuff is there already. Still not sure that I like the polkit stuff but if you're a real sysadmin - not like me - you probably need to know that stuff anyway.
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'su -c' doesn't work on my Debian 12 system where the root user is locked and has no password. This type of configuration is becoming more common. As I understand it, the run0 functionality is already in systemd-run and run0 is more like a wrapper than an additional thing. It actually sounds depressingly rational to me.
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@zeckma It's still possible, with sudo privileges, to unlock root and set a password. It's just not the standard configuration and so 'su -c' won't work on systems using the standard configuration where you don't have authority to make changes to root functionality on.
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@dovonun It can get pretty simple when you strip things down or build out a minimal system to suit just what you want to do. This is why so many IoT devices use Linux too. A full operating system in under a gigabyte of binaries and scripts. My Alpine system that I use as a wifi scanning appliance occupies 168Mb of disk space and runs in 36Mb of RAM at idle. You can either pick a distro that suits or build a system scaling from what I have running on a 32bit eeePC to massive multiuser system. It's up to you to choose what you want.
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@lis6502 Ironic this comment. I just had my system fail to boot because something went wrong with a BtrFS file system I had mounted via /etc/fstab and I couldn't access the single user (or 'safe' or 'recovery') mode as the root user was locked. Bummer. I had to resort to a Kali live-boot USB disk, mount the root filesystem and edit the /etc/fstab file to comment out the problematic mount. At the same time I also chroot'ed into the root filesystem, unlocked root and set a password. Rebooted and up she came in all her former glory except for all the VMs I had on that BtrFS filesystem. It looks like they are hosed. So you are absolutely right that not having a password on root can have it's own problems, but as long as you actually control the hardware and can manage what the machine boots from, you can recover. I put this comment here not to 'win' a point as what you said is valid, but for the information of anyone else who may find it informative.
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