Adding /sbin and /usr/sbin to everyone's path in F10

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 11:18 AM, Lubomir Kundrak <lkundrak at redhat.com> wrote:
>
>  On Wed, 2008-04-23 at 17:01 +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
>  > On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 07:53:04PM +0400, Dmitry Butskoy wrote:
>  > > Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:
>  > >> I propose that we add /sbin and /usr/sbin to the path for normal users
>  > >> (as well as root) for F10? There are plenty of useful tools in there for
>  > >> non-root users (ifconfig, fdisk, parted), and IMHO, any tool which
>  > >> assumes the user is root because it lives in /sbin is fundamentally
>  > >> broken.
>  > >
>  > > Perhaps the initial ancient UNIX idea was to isolate unprivileged users
>  > > from commands which they cannot run. IOW, to avoid a situation "I've
>  > > discovered that there is a command, but why I have no rights to run it?" :)
>  >
>  > AFAIK the /sbin split was done around the late 80s.  First saw it in
>  > SunOS.  Old (V7 etc.) versions of Unix just had /bin and /usr/bin.
>
>  Yep, but it had the administrative commands in /etc. Unless I am
>  wrong, /sbin was a new home for them to separate them from configuration
>  files.
>

That is my recollection also. It was not in v7 but  was in SysV for
the reason you listed. I think SunOS-1 still had a lot of binaries in
/etc. SunOS-2 was completely SysV and moved the items into /sbin,
/bin. One idea was that service binaries could be protected by chmod
etc out of the main path-views so even putting /sbin:/usr/sbin would
not help a non-root user start up their own telnetd on port 9999.
[selinux on the real cheap.]



-- 
Stephen J Smoogen. -- CSIRT/Linux System Administrator
How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed
in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. "The Merchant of Venice"