On Monday 14 December 2009 06:56:02 Rodney Baker wrote:
Unfortunately, if you are logged in as root and don't think carefully about what you're doing, nothing can protect your system from you or any other rogue process launched during that time. Hands up anyone who's accidentally damaged/destroyed a system by typing 'rm -rf *' whilst logged in as root and being in the wrong directory (e.g. / :-()...you usually only do that once!
In a discussion about system protection people often repeat what root can do to system, while for personal computers is equally important what user can do. On the majority of personal computers user is synonym for a single user, computer owner. The system protection in that context is equivalent of the user data protection, as that is the only part of the system that can't be recovered if it is lost and user has no backup, so discussion how to protect system from the naive user should talk more about data protection. To remove all user data for good it is *not* necessary to be a root. What root adds to loss is about 30-40 minutes of pain to reinstall, and then some time to customize system. -- Regards Rajko, openSUSE Wiki Team: http://en.opensuse.org/Wiki_Team People of openSUSE: http://en.opensuse.org/People_of_openSUSE/About -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org