On Sunday 28 April 2002 14:58, Joshua Lee wrote:
On Sunday 28 April 2002 02:32 pm, J. Scott Thayer, M.D. wrote:
Now THAT'S interesting since I never had this with 7.3 or any previous release (and, GASP, I ALWAYS run as root since linux 0.99pl6 in 1994 or 95 and I have never trashed a system for THAT reason :-) )
Whippersnapper! My first Linux kernel was 0.95!
What was that... 4 days before 0.99????? ;-) This old man just can't remember... You are absolutely right in principle AND practice. And I am online 100% of the time. So I am on a private network behind a hardware firewall. And the only other person on the network is my wife who sits about 2 feel away from me and could beat my password out of me anyway..... Scott
That having been said, the problem nowadays isn't so much as you trashing the system by running as root, it's by crackers owning a X windows system if you run X as root. If you need rootley powers at any given time (you probably already know this but maybe others in this thread don't) use su to change identity to root for those tasks. It's such a cause for exploits on the net that several IRC channels automatically kick/ban anyone who logs in as root.