We need DOs and DONTs in addition to CoC

**cariboo** · July 13th, 2011

I personally have no problem with telling someone how to log in as root, we usually refer people to the RootSudo howto, but I also include a warning as to how dangerous running as root all the time can be. What I am against is telling someone that asks on the forums. I feel, that if you have to ask, you shouldn't be doing it. It takes a 30 second search of Google, to come up with an answer, asking on the forums, seems to me to be just plain laziness.

**bodhi.zazen** · July 14th, 2011

Originally Posted by mips

I don't agree with protecting people from their own actions. If you don't understand how something works in life then you should not blindly follow advice from strangers, ubuntu is no different to life in general when it comes to this. To much nannying going on in the world as it is.

That is a poor attitude to have in life, let alone on a support site. When you are needing support, Ubuntu or otherwise, I certainly hope you find someone who cares for your welfare more then you care about the welfare of others.

We are in fact holding out the Ubuntu Forums as a place where people can get support. While we can not review each and every post, we improve support in several important ways.

First, advice given here is "peer reviewed". By that I mean that advice is given in public and if bad advice is given it will be reviewed and corrected.

Second, does the attitude you expressed extend to your willingness to support people in such a crisis ? Are you going to do the data recovery ? Are you going to pay for the professional data recovery service ? Data loss can occur and sometimes the data we are talking about is valuable and irreplaceable. As again we are a support site we do have an obligation to protect people form bad advice that might be given.

This site is not perfect, we can not review each and every post, we do not have the staff to do that. But we do have mechanisms in place to have bad advice corrected or removed when it is identified.

As a member of the community I hope you would help when you see bad advice given here as well

In terms of root login, this has been discussed many times and is a dead horse.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=716201

The general gist of the conversation is we refer people to what we consider the proper information and expect them to read.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RootSudo

Security is one of the exceptions to the general policy I have on "RTFM", I strongly believe people need to read security information.

When logging in as root is necessary , it is supported. With sudo (and sudo -I), I have not needed to log in as root since I learned to use sudo, with Ubuntu 6.06 (before then I did log in as root as I knew how).

In terms of sudo, I noticed that over time all major distros are migrating to sudo. First debian and not even fedora use sudo (although you can opt for the old su method if you wish). More and more people are advising sudo over su on both Debian and Fedora (although you will still find some hold outs). Although sudo has been available for a long time in Fedora, with fedora 15 sudo is now optionally configured for the first user during the installation, optionally as in Debian (before it was not an installation options and had to be manually configured post install). If you select sudo during the installation of either Debian or Fedora the root account will be locked, as in Ubuntu.

sudo has a number of advantages over su, including logging and graded access to root power. These advantages may not be apparent on a single user or single admin system, but on a multi user or multi admin environment the advantages of sudo are rapidly apparent.

**PCaddicted** · July 20th, 2011

The Forum DOs and DONTs fail to mention that we mustn't post malicious commands and dig up very old infractionable posts.

**lisati** · July 20th, 2011

Originally Posted by PCaddicted

The Forum DOs and DONTs fail to mention that we mustn't post malicious commands and dig up very old infractionable posts.

Well, actually, from http://ubuntuforums.org/index.php?page=policy:

Never instruct users to do anything that might break their system.

This is a non-exhaustive list of reasons a thread may be closed, but will give the general idea:

The thread has run it's course and posts have begun repeating themes
The thread has degraded into an argument
The thread topic is a duplicate of another current and active thread
The thread is very old.