On Fri, 21 Mar 2025 at 22:10, Patrick O'Callaghan <pocallaghan@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Fri, 2025-03-21 at 14:18 -0700, Samuel Sieb wrote:
> Maybe if there's no admin user. By default, root doesn't even have a
> password.
What? Every Linux (and UNIX) system I've ever used has had a root
password, including Fedora. In fact, Anaconda asks you to set one up at
installation. Or did you mean something else?
It's pretty common for baked cloud images and VMs to be provisioned with no explicit root password set.
Just a standard shared or break-glass user (ec2user/admin/ubuntu/whatever) with one or more pubkeys dropped into the common user's authorized_keys via UserData/cloud-init, and a corresponding sudo config stub.
The root user exists but has no password set (nb: not an empty/blank password, but a 'locked' account in terms of direct login, so root can only be assumed via sudo or something like an SSM agent.)
e.g.
[wmcdonald@fedora ~ ]$ ssh i-085545b2b626c7e1f
admin@ip-10-0-1-63:~$ grep root /etc/passwd
root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash
admin@ip-10-0-1-63:~$ sudo grep root /etc/shadow
root:*:19643:0:99999:7:::
admin@ip-10-0-1-63:~$ grep root /etc/passwd
root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash
admin@ip-10-0-1-63:~$ sudo grep root /etc/shadow
root:*:19643:0:99999:7:::
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