I am a long time Red Hat user, relatively new SuSE user.

I have always stayed logged in as root on my personal Linux boxen and felt guilty that I wasn't doing what I tell my customers to do ... log in as a USER, and only use root when you need it.

SuSE 8.2 changed all of that by giving me a less than complete set of menus for the root install, thus *encouraging* me to log in as myself.

The POINT of this post is that when I run Yast2, or YOU, or any other privileged application, I enter the root password in the dialog box and I check the box that says "Remember this password" .... it doesn't. I stiill have to type the stupid password EVERY time.

Any ideas, thoughts, sympathetic grunts?

Why do you want to do that?

he wants to do that so that he doesn't have to write the complex root password everytime he needs to run apps that require root priviledge. i am sharing the grunt with you obarney, if suse cannot remember the password then why 'Keep Password' option ? even in suse 8.0 it was ok.

Exactly. I went to all of this trouble to make a hard to crack / impossible to guess password and now I have to type it 100 times a day because much of what I do requires root.

I am thinking of just going back to doing everything as root. This switching back and forth is annoying. I'm the only one on the machine. The only real threat that I can see from doing everything as root is that if I install some service and it gets compromised, the attacker is in as root.

Anyone else have any good (actual) reasons for me to NOT go back?

you would have to modify roots account to be that of an extra-ordinary user. ie paths, menus...

you have to ./ everytime you want to run a command in a given dir.

you might seriously damage your system doing something whimsical.

you will run the (remote) risk of damage via a UNIX trojan.

My idea...
Run an xterm somewhere on your desktop, su to root, and then start all of your root-requiring apps from there.

Right, having an open root xterm for kickstarting specific tasks is the way I do it now. What is annoying is when I find and try to run some little nugget on a GUI menu and I get ... nothing. Then I go looking around for the log file and find out that it will only run as root. Sure, I can get around it, but it is annoying. (Or I forget I'm not root and I try to "find / -name somefile" only to get tons of errors.)

Obviously, we don't usually have an idea of the experience level of a person asking a question on a forum like this. As a UNIX admin for about ten years on several brands of UNIX/Linux I am aware that doing "whimsical things" (I like that phrase) as root can be dangerous. We've all heard the "I didn't KNOW I was in / when I ran that rm command!" stories.

I guess I was looking for specific threats I'd be opening myself to if I log on as root all the time, as opposed to the general risk.

Thanks for the suggestions though.