On 29 Jun 2001 08:11:04 -0400, n6tadam wrote:
I am interested to know, how many of you, actually use a non-root account to get work done. Since there is so many risks of constantly using a root account, how in the world are you supposed to get work done without being logged in as root??
I always log in as a regular user, after some early experience of doing "stupid sysadmin tricks" as the root user. I add myself to the sudoers file so I can run one-off commands as root. If I actually need to do something as root (edit the httpd.conf file & restart apache, for example), I have an icon on my panel to bring up a terminal as root. (Because of this I also have an icon to lock the screen when I'm away, which I use regularly.)
For example, most of my bash scripts that I write, require the use of certain files, which, if not ran as root, would require me to run numerous chmod/chgrp commands to get them to run.
Have you tried adding your username to the correct groups in the /etc/group file? I had to add myself to the disk group before I could get my cd-player prog to run as non-root. You can also use sudo in your scripts to access commands or files that need root access. Add your username to the sudoers file and specify the commands you need along with the "NOPASSWD:" keyword. While this does have some security ramifications (if your account is compromised, the intruder will have access to those commands), it is safer to use sudo than to run everything as root. Daniel