Confessions of a Real-World Linux Admin: “I Always Login As Root.”

This is not funny but it is a hard reality. Many new sys admin prefer to login as root.

FTA, "There are over ten million businesses in America that support fewer than 20 employees, each. Many are start-ups or otherwise minimally capitalized, and Linux fills a networking need without straining the budget... especially when they donâ€™t bother hiring professional help."

Kurt manages the office for one of them (via).

As an experienced admin, I do not recommend running anything as root:

Take advantage of this - most services are able to drop root access/rights as soon as they go into background
Do not grant root access to anyone use sudo
Do not grant shell access to everyone (e.g. FTP and email users). Also consider securing and auditing the shell access with Enterprise Audit Shell
Default firewall policy - close all doors open required windows i.e. only open or filter required ports
Run critical services in chrooted jail
Run only required network servers or services
Take advantage of LDAP and/or PAM to implement more advanced authentication security schema
If possible bound service to only loopback device 127.0.0.1 (for example MySQL should always bound to 127.0.0.1)
Monitor logs using logwatch or other automated softwares
Subscribe to your distribution security alert mailing list
Restrict access using iptables/PF, acl, user rights etc
And most important backup regularly