Hey,

I have two computers at home, one solely for me and one for my family. I am running Gentoo and my family are running Ubuntu.

Since they lack experience in terms of Linux they will not be getting full root access (I'm able to limit root access on Ubuntu) I will need to maintain it for them.

So, given these two computers are in a LAN, would I be able to access the Ubuntu root account from my Gentoo account given that I know the root password?

Also, what is required to do this, how difficult is it to setup and what are the security risks involved?

Thanks
Tom

PS. I am debating with myself whether or not to give the user accounts access to Synaptic Package Manager (GUI for apt-get), what do you think?

So, given these two computers are in a LAN, would I be able to access the Ubuntu root account from my Gentoo account given that I know the root password?

Yes


Also, what is required to do this,
user@gentooBOX:~$ ssh -l root ubuntuBOX


how difficult is it to setup
openssh is usually installed by default


and what are the security risks involved?
from the manpage:

it also allows file transfer (scp / sftp) and tunnelling (long story )


PS. I am debating with myself whether or not to give the user accounts access to Synaptic Package Manager (GUI for apt-get), what do you think?
I think you'd be asking for trouble.

Well ... there's ssh. Allowing ssh root access would be daft, though.
Create a seperate user account for yourself, ssh into the machine,
and then su - to do whatever you need to do. And for the sake of
simplicity, don't use synaptic, use apt-get to do package management.

You could also add their user account to the sudoers file, and give them
the right to run apt-get/synaptic ...


Cheers,
Tink

Thanks for the quick response, I'll have to read up on SSH more (from what I've read so far it uses the RSA algorithm for encryption, always a good thing).

Also, about the Synaptic thing, yeah, you're probably right. I'll just install everything my family need now and then whenever they need anything else they can ask me and I'll decide whether or not they can have it :P