On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 12:48 PM, Chris Murphy lists@colorremedies.com wrote:
Hi,
In Fedora 20 and 21, the installer doesn't require setting the root password. Yet systemd in both requires a root password to do anything, including basic boot time troubleshooting, in both rescue.target and emergency.target.
If the user is dropped to an emergency shell at boot, and are referred to rdsosreport.txt, they can't do anything if they haven't set a root password. And if they need to do a password reset, they're stuck also.
Questions
Is this the intended and desired UX for Workstation?
If not, what policy change is most practical? Requiring the user set a root password, or somehow enabling systemd emergency.target to accept a non-root user in group wheel?
It's been a while since I installed openSUSE but my recollection is that the default is to set the root password to the same value as the user password. You can uncheck that and use another password. Also, the non-root user is *not* in the 'wheel' group by default IIRC.
I'd go that route - require a root password but give the user the option to copy the administrator password to 'root'.
Points of comparison
Windows has a burdensome password reset method, but it does offer startup repair environments that don't require a password. OS X has a safe boot option, as well as a separate recovery environment, also without requiring a password, and a password reset can be done within this environment.
-- Chris Murphy -- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop