Hello Nvidia Devs. Is it possible or let’s say is it a good idea to set a password or even disable the root user on the Spark GB10? I was a bit surprised that it has no password at all. TIA for helping out.
Not sure how you set up your system, but I certainly have a sudo pwd, and it is not recommended to have any linux system with no superuser password
Thanks for your answer. I unpacked the Spark and got through the initial setup. I created a user as you should and this user is called markus and has sudo privileges. That was not my question, tho. I asked specifically about the root user who after this procedure has no password set. I did sudo grep '^root:' /etc/shadow what gave me root:*:20306:0:99999:7::: which to me looks like there is no password set. This is why I am asking if setting one or even disabling the root account at all would be a good idea on the Spark.
There is no root password because the root account is locked (which is the default behavior on Ubuntu-based systems). You can verify this using sudo passwd -S root from the CLI, and the output should look like this:
dgx-spark:~$ sudo passwd -S root
root L 2025-08-06 0 99999 7 -1
You can then go read the passwd manpage:
-S, --status
Display account status information. The status information consists of 7 fields. The first field is the user's login
name. The second field indicates if the user account has a locked password (L), has no password (NP), or has a usable
password (P). The third field gives the date of the last password change. The next four fields are the minimum age,
maximum age, warning period, and inactivity period for the password. These ages are expressed in days.
It is not possible to log in as root unless you specifically set a password on the account.
Leave it as is.
Many thanks for making this clear. I was not sure if it is locked or not. Not the best Linux admin ever here, but still learning. I always want to make sure the system is as secure as possible without going full paranoia. 😎 Thanks again. Appreciate your support.