Running as root 6759
Daveman750 This would be because, in contrast to windows, things will work quite well when not run as root on a *NIX system. In windows, even the most common apps...
Mon, 05 Dec 2005 21:20:51 -0800, Daveman750
It will happen time and time again that some users just can't be arsed typing a five letter pbuttword. They are always totally deaf when you attempt to tell them why we have a seperate root-admin user to standard users.
Erik Funkenbusch Is that a money back guarantee? Because Office insists on writing into program files. You can make it run as...
'...screw you and what ever you lot do, I'm not bothering with users, I'm just having root cos I'm smart enough to do that...'.
Well lets forget about any of the security reasons, after all we had root and admin users in UNIX long before they were any major hacks or malicious code being reported.
We had them as a safety net. One user can't damage the system for other users. Also if a user damages their own login or application setup files, forgets a pbuttword or damages a shell launch script, we can go to root or admin to fix it.
If your only user is root and you screw up even a simple profile file then there is a risk that the only solution might be to boot from the install-rescue CD. If it so happened that you had used encrypted file systems, then starting from scratch may well be your only option.
Multiple root users is easy to do, as you asked the question maybe you could tell us a valid reason for creating more than one root. I know some, I just wonder if you do. Creating extra root users isn't unsafe, in fact can be usefull, in the sense of various levels of root or admin. It isn't all that difficult to create an admin user for your machine that only covers installations, another for anything in web controls and so on.
Which is precisely what application caging is going to do, it's already shipped in your distro and going by online discussions isn't far off being applied throughout the system by default. Linux systems have to protect themselves because security was for a long time its biggest point, obviously that has changed now we will get more and more exWin users who just come in because being anti-MS is kewl these days, one of the things it must protect itself from are ex windows users who don't give a poo about those machines they connect to, what nasties they might be pbutting on due to their own lazyness when it comes to keeping things clean.
I wonder if there is still something you haven't thought about though, what to do about those things that can not run as root, or rather, refuse to run because of excess rights.
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