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amigan_99Flag for United States of America

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Is removing root user from linux common or advisable?

I inherited a Cent-OS Unix system and in our password vault there are passwords for the SQL user and a few
other things. But nothing for user "root". Is it possible that during the setup of the system that the root account
was disabled or removed and individual users were just made sudoers with access to everything with sudo?
Or would that be an uncommon practice?
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noci

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So life can carry on without knowing the specific password for root so long as there are some
sodoers with rights to do anything when sodoing? I'm just not sure if the fact that the vault lacks
a user "root" and its password. So far I've been able to restart sql and do other operations with
sudo.
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In fact I did get to the shell with sudo -s now that you mention it. Thank you.
there are ways to reset the root password and that could be added to the password vault. But a good backup should be done first just in case it breaks something.
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noci

One place i was there were 3 System Managers that on turn, each month would replace all root passwords with random generated 25+ character string passwords that went into a sealed enveloppe. (different for each system)...
The enveloppes went into a vault, the replacement required a security officer did the replacement under supervision of anther System Manager where the enveloppe seals were verified and the old envelope went straight into the shredder.

Once a year the procedure was verified by the security officer.
Some Linux distributions, like Ubuntu, have the root login disabled. They force you to use sudo as best practice.

Not sure if centos is also one of these distributions that do this by default.

Anyway, if the system was set up like this, best to leave it that way. It gives you a better way to audit who executed something with root privileges.