Sudo

To speed up tasks which would otherwise require me to login as root, I very quickly hacked to sudoers files to allow all users in the wheel group to sudo any command without a password, and added my user to wheel.

Whilst this is very convenient in speeding up the time it takes to mount the cdrom drive, mount samba shares, poweroff the computer etc (especially by using aliases such as poweroff="sudo /sbin/poweroff" in ~/.bashrc), it is also pretty insecure, since any user who gains access to my account can run any command, or become root by running "sudo su" with no need for a password.

So bear in mind, this is not a permanent solution to my annoyance at having to be root to turn off the computer (and other such things). I really need to tighten up the security on the computer a lot (if only I wasn't so lazy).