From a trickle to an Application Stream: Red Hat opens barriers for RHEL 8.3 beta

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.3 has hit beta, with security and production stability pointed to as key goals for the update. RHEL 8.0 was released in May 2019 and introduced the concept of "Application Streams", based on a separate repository dedicated to "all the applications you might want to run in a given userspace" …

[stiine]

re: set root password and create a user

Why? I can understand the requirement to set the root password, but if the machine is going to be joined to an ldap or active directory domain, then there shouldn't be any local users in the first place, but of course this what happens when you want to run the same OS on both a Z/os mainframe and a Thinkpad.

[Dazed and Confused]

Re: re: set root password and create a user

I suspect that it really the case that you either need to define a root password or you need to define a local user and "make them an administrator" (ie they're in the wheel group). That's how it works currently. The change seems to be bringing this step forward to the main hub screen whereas from 7.0 -> 8.2 you finished on the hub screen and hit "begin install" at which point you got a new screen where you got the root password and add a user option.

[Steve Davies 3]

Re: re: set root password and create a user

There is nothing stopping you from disabling that local user once you have joined the LDAP etc. However, I've found it a lifesaver to have a local account around when the LDAP etc has the heebie-jeebies.

We keep the passwords in the data safe along with the security keys.

but naturally, each to their own.

[Bronek Kozicki]

Re: re: set root password and create a user

Actually it's a good practice to have a non-root user in the wheel (i.e. sudoers) group, to fall back to when some outage prevents connections to kerberos domain etc. Alternatively you could use root of course, but logging as root is not best practice because the potential for fatal mistake is too big.

[TrevorH]

I've not used the 8.3 beta installer but it looks like they just moved the user creation bit into the stuff that has to be filled in before the install can start. If it's like it was before this change, when you got to fill it in at your leisure while the install was running, then setting the root password is mandatory but the user creation is optional. If you look at the text it does actually say "No user will be created".