I've been using Ubuntu for a few years, happily typing sudo or gksu for any of my administrative tasks, never thinking much about my root profile.
I've recently installed Arch and Gentoo a few times and discovered the convenience of logging into a root shell for doing heavy, maintenance-related activities. I fully understand the risks involved and don't do this regularly, and I normally only have it in a terminal or a TTY (since messing with the contents of your home folder with root privilages creates a permissions nightmare when you log back into your profile).
So, I was creating a new partition table and directory structure in Ubuntu, and I thought, "Hey, this would be much better with a root shell." I attempted to login as root using my password, and discovered that this was not the root password. I used... some commands that are not allowed to passed along on the Ubuntu message board (seriously. I almost got bant from the #ubuntu IRC channel because I was going to tell a guy)... and I changed the root password, logged in as root, did my business, etc, etc, /etc/fstab, and all is well.
This got me wondering, where does the default root password in Ubuntu come from. I guess it must be randomly generated at install or something, being that having a set default would be a major security problem, but I haven't a clue what goes into that. It kinda bugs me that a Linux system, based on the ideology of empowering the user, doesn't allow you to set the root password durring the install, but I guess it makes sense, given the target audience.
So what's up?
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