Categories
- System accounts
- Responsible for running background tasks on your system (ex. webserver, database, etc)
- They don’t have a home directory
- Regular users
- They have access to their own files and directories
- CANNOT perform administrative tasks or access other user’s files w/o permission
- we want situations where the regular uses will temporarily gain root privileges
- Administrator (Sudo user)
- Just added to the
sudo group
- Has
sudo privileges but must still use sudo to execute privileged commands
- Superuser (root)
- has UNRESTRICTED access to the entire system (including files in the home directories of regular users)
- Can add/remove users, install software
- can change the configuration of the system
In Ubuntu
- By default, Ubuntu does not set a password for root during installation.
- This means you cannot log in directly as root from the login screen or via SSH.
- Technically you can manually enable the root account by setting a password for root, but it’s NOT recommended (for security concerns)
- Instead, you use
sudo to execute commands with root privileges, and this uses your regular user’s password.