Renaming 'root'

[Harvey]

Some slashdot guy mentioned this...

My apologies to anyone who is actually bright enough to change ID=0 from root to anything else and has left a "root" account on the box to confuse the script kiddies. (Gee I've gotten root, now why won't any of my scripts do what other people tell me they're supposed to?)

Is he saying that you can actually make the super user have any other name that you wanted to and just leave root there, but not give it any special priviledges? Cool! How do you go about doing that? I assume it has something to do to setting some other user to ID=0 or something to that effect...

Do you guys recommend this?

------------------
Help me I'm Harvey!

[Waffle_King]

I say don't bother, you'll just end up confusing yourself. If you feel the need to do this just as a protection against script kiddies, then you need to secure your box more. May I suggest one of our many fine NHF's? http://www.linuxnewbie.org/ubb/smile.gif

[Golden_Eternity]

Its not all that hard to do, and I do know people who think this is some elite key to security...

About all it will protect you from is targetted brute force login attacks at your 'root' account... If you don't notice a few thousand failed logins and maybe block that ip... well, if you have a secure password they still probably wont get in anyway.

That nifty buffer overflow in sendmail or bind doesn't care if its running as root or rewt, its still gonna drop you into a shell with UID 0.

Lastly some programs aren't coded to look for the UID being 0, they look for your username being root. That's not very secure, but it happens, and that means that you could run into trouble with some things. I had this trouble the one time I tried renaming root...

Really, its just pointless... It gives you the false impression that you have some security through obscurity, but it does nothing...