Author: john lewis Date: To: hampshire Subject: Re: [Hampshire] Directory permissions in Ubunut v Debian
On Thu, 1 May 2008 17:24:47 +0100
Simon Huggins <huggie@???> wrote:
> On Thu, May 01, 2008 at 04:25:06PM +0100, john lewis wrote:
> > On Thu, 1 May 2008 15:51:01 +0100
> > Simon Huggins <huggie@???> wrote:
> > > On Thu, May 01, 2008 at 02:53:30PM +0100, john lewis wrote:
> > > > IMHO admin tasks should be done as the root user and not as a
> > > > pseudo root.
> > > Other than not liking it, can I ask why you think that?
> > as I said it is my opinion, admin jobs are not things to be done
> > lightly so having to login as root gives them a higher status
> > sort of thing.
>
> People will be lazy. People will su to root and never log out again
> until they remember.
I am incredibly lazy as I open a root shell tab in konsole* and keep
it open all the time. It has a different schema (green on black)
to my user shell (black on yellow) so it reminds me I am acting as
root.
This would only be dangerous if I allowed someone knowledgeable about
linux physical access to my system or in the event of a breakin as I
never switch off.
> sudo also times out whereas su stays logged in. Hopefully people
> use locking screensavers but I know I don't always everywhere.
I don't like screen savers but then they aren't really needed in my
situation working mainly from home. I suppose I should use them on my
laptop but since that is only used at things like LUG meets where
hopefully I can trust people not to meddle :-)
> I quite like sudo. Obviously whatever method you use you need to
> realise that doing things as root is potentially dangerous.
One reason I tend to use mc for file management is that it is less
likely summat like rm -r * will happen.
*konsole is the one good thing in KDE <grin> I haven't found any
other terminal emulator I would swap for it. I do have multi-aterm
installed as it is from the wmaker stable but it is nothing like as
good as konsole.
