Hi,

I changed the UID of a regular user account to 0 and root to 600 and the regular user account can execute root priviledges. I wonder if it is posible to have 2 or more root users on a linux box?

Thanks

I know of no reason why you cannot have multiple users as root (i.e. UID 0). Keep in mind that when you make a file as a user with a UID of 0 it will not display that users name of the user who created it (when you do a ls -l). As I understand it, the ownership of a file is not saved as the username (or group name as the case may be), but as the UID (or GID), so your "regular user" with a UID of 0 will create files with this UID and since the first user to translate out to the UID in the /etc/passwd file will likey be root, root will show as the owner of these files.

Also please keep in mind all of the standard warning messages that go along with extensive use of a root (UID 0) account. It is amazingly easy to do very bad things to your system in a hurry if you are not careful.

I was gonna use this on one of the servers on my office. One programmer has changed the root password and didn't gave me a copy. I tend to change my account's UID to 0 as a BACK-DOOR to root access without him knowing. Do you think this is the best resort for my situation?

Whoever is admin of the box is much better using sudo to give other users access to root level commands. Giving out the root password to multiple users or having multiple UID 0 acounts is really a bad idea and can cause problems (users being able to lock the admin out is just one example) and also is a logging nightmare. Plus with sudo, you can limit what access the "privileged" users have on a more granular level.

thanks for your reply.

My workstation has 2 users with the UID of 0 and I havent noticed any issues in the 3 years that I've had it set up like this other than any files created by the non root named one says they're owned by root ( which is just because root is at the top of the list in /etc/passwd ). Back when I set this up though I did notice a lot of problems with getting rid of the root user so I wouldn't recommend trying that. What I did on my machine was set my root password to 100+ character password that way it wont be easy to crack the password for about another 50 years. Make sure you remember what the password is though because there are times that some programs ask for your root password ( like when you have issues changing to a RW root file system on boot. )