Thank you for your response!
I like the idea of every user user logging in automatically having root permissions (without the need for sudo). This more resembles the Windows model where you are either an admin or not. It doesn't offer the granularity of control that you have with sudo, but on the other hand you also do not have the effort of configuring this granularity through /etc/sudoers.
However, wila is making a good point about logging: That is important, so having every console command sent to syslog (including time stamp and the original user id issuing it) is a necessity.
According to your question: I'm not really concerned about the API missing a functionality that you have with console access only. We need the console access in situations where API access is not available remotely (because the management network is down), or not at all, because hostd is malfunctioning or has crashed, or when the host as a whole becomes unresponsive, e.g. because of hardware related issues or special heap memory pool exhaustions.
I am aware that hostd (and ESXi as a whole) has a very high overall code quality, but every software has bugs, and I experienced quite a few issues in the past that made it necessary to access the console, because you could not use the API.
- Andreas
