This session is running as a privileged user box?

Doug Ledford dledford at redhat.com
Mon Jun 30 17:09:07 UTC 2008


On Mon, 2008-06-30 at 00:29 -0400, Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:
> On Sun, 2008-06-29 at 21:58 -0600, Jerry Williams wrote:
> > I am the only user most of the time on the box and I know that you
> > should login as a normal user most of the time.
> 
> No, really, what you should do is login as a normal user _all_ of the
> time, and use sudo or su to take root access only when you really need
> it.

There are valid reasons to log in as root.  Sometimes even always log in
as root (think test machine you wipe out over and over again and root is
the only account that ever exists on the machine, or times when NIS is
down and all the user accounts don't exist temporarily, or times when
NIS is up, but NFS is down and user home directories don't exist).
Regardless, the ability to turn off a nag over something you know well
and understand and accept the risks of doesn't seem to out of the
question to me (although I could also see hiding the knob to turn it off
in some deep foo so that a person can't turn it off without really
knowing what they are doing, which implies maybe they know what they are
doing logging in as they are).

> What you're doing is analogous to using a loaded shotgun as a golf club,
> and what you're suggesting is that we take the safety off, because it
> interferes with your golf game.

Hehehe, if that's how a person wants to play golf.... ;-)

-- 
Doug Ledford <dledford at redhat.com>
              GPG KeyID: CFBFF194
              http://people.redhat.com/dledford

Infiniband specific RPMs available at
              http://people.redhat.com/dledford/Infiniband

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