Some security

It's time to begin hardening our machine (just a little bit for now).
With the help of this page, we proceed by preventing the root to log remotely to our box. We will provide another user that will become superuser if needed.

First move, create an user account

useradd your-user -G users,wheel
passwd your-passwd

Allow this user to become root, without supplying a password (to be more accurate, all the users of group whell can do that)

visudo

This is a vi editor window so type a to enter edit mode. Uncomment the line

%wheel ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL

And then type esc :wq to save and exit.

We have to prevent root to login remotelly : edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config and add or uncomment the line

PermitRootLogin no

We finish all this by restarting the sshd service

service sshd restart

Now, the user we created can log-in with ssh and become super-user with

sudo su -

Done.

Actually I don't like very much to have another user log as root without a password. So I modified back the visudo line to

%wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL