Bugzilla – Bug 119810
sshd shouldn't be started by default
Last modified: 2005-12-15 14:07:14 UTC
I did a standard installation of openSuse and noticed that sshd is running automatically. I think it should no do that for the following reason: people use opensuse on their desktop computers and on their notebooks which are often protected by means of a BIOS password and/or a hard-disk password. Thus people will tend to use a less secure password for their Linux user account. Many people will not be aware that this is a problem, as they are not aware that you can remotely log in by default. Also, for everbody who needs sshd it would only take 30 seconds to activate it. And it takes time to start, plus it uses memory. That's why it should not start by default (it should of course be installed by default -- but not started).
Andreas, what do you think about it? It can be made by yast option in similiar way as firewall have it. But I don't like disable sshd daemon by default, because IMHO a lot of people expect this behaviour.
Actually I now installed the final version and now there'a a real bug: the summary installation screen contains an item like "sshd is deactivated" (translated back from German). I clicked on the "deactivated" to see what happens, so it changed to "activated". I clicked again so it should be deactivated (and it showed "deactivated"). However, sshd was running anyway when the installation was finished. Besides that, I don't see why it matters that some people expect sshd to run by default. Those who do NOT expect it have a good chance to have a security problem. This is more important than saving the few seconds of work for those who want sshd to be installed.
sshd is the one service we consider necessary and useful to run. The problem you are refering to is a bit problematic missdescribed entry in the Firewall heading on the Network Workflow page. You are right that people perhaps use too easy passwords. Those people will however likely not change this default firewall setting either. We can discuss this for 10.1, but all experienced users will kill us for it if we do that.
YaST team, let's change the text from "sshd is deactivated" to "sshd port is blocked". Let's still have ssh running by default...
reassign to yast2 maintainers
OK, I'll change the text for 10.1
Texts were fixed in SVN, it should be available in the next Alpha/Beta.
*** Bug 139348 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***