Re: playing god

[ABrady <kcsmart kc rr com>]

On Thu, 07 Mar 2002 16:00:13 -0800
Rick Stevens <rstevens vitalstream com> quietly intimated:

> ABrady wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, 07 Mar 2002 09:16:12 -0800
> > Rick Stevens <rstevens vitalstream com> quietly intimated:
> 
> Well, not so quietly, perhaps!
> 
>  
> >>ABrady wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>>On Thu, 7 Mar 2002 14:12:25 +0530 (IST)
> >>>"Rupendra Singh" <rupendra kiet edu> quietly intimated:
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>>working as root in linux is like playing god.
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>Well, something like that. But, presumably God always knows what
> >>>He's doing!
> >>>
> >>
> >>You've obviously not met enough people with root privileges, or you
> >>wouldn't DARE say that!
> >>
> > 
> > What I meant is, God would be wise enough not to screw it up.
> > Anybody else would be indeed "playing" God, which is a dangerous
> > game for those without absolute knowledge. I don't have it, and I've
> > been doing this a few years. I doubt that most people logging in as
> > root continuously would have the wisdom to avoid total annihilation
> > of the system.
> 
> 
> Ah, true.  The famous "rm -rf /".  You're right.  One thing about
> the proliferation of Unixen on cheap hardware is that there are far
> more incidents of that nature than there used to be.  That's only
> because, in ye olde days, to become root was chilling.  Everyone
> pointed at you as the guy with in the robes with the pointed hat and
> funny-looking walking stick.  If something went wrong, YOU were the
> only person responsible.  As a result, you treaded lightly. "Here
> be there dragons!"

I recall my first "act of God" on linux. I was only using root and was
trying to follow along in a book. This was RH4.2. Anyway, I found out
about the "chmod" command and saw what it could do. I was just learning
how to setup a dialup. I could get it to operate as root, but not as a
user. So, I logged in as root, and since I still didn't know where pppd
was, I covered all bases:

# chmod -R a+wrx /

After that, I could boot, get lots of errors, couldn't log in and had no
idea how to fix it. I learned rapidly after the reinstall about how to
avoid that little item in the future.

> Now, root is a convenience for people.  I admit, if it's your box,
> do what you wish.  But if it's a box LOTS of people use (and I am
> one of those who adminster over 100 Linux boxes with tens of
> thousands of users), you STILL tread lightly.  Not only are there
> dragons, but they have pink slips!  And they're willing to use them!

There are a lot of fortunate people out there that didn't have me as an
admin. As a matter of fact, everybody was lucky because I was using it
at home and not destroying things for others. Now I could handle it
nicely, but I'm mostly stuck with NT where I work. And I don't admin any
of that (yet) either. I keep sudo handy, log in with su when needed,
advise new people about how to avoid using it and leave it alone. I keep
one session open for compiling programs and manually running some
processes (fetchnews for leafnode, for instance), and I keep it
separated enough that there's no mistake about which terminal I'm using.
Otherwise I avoid using it.

-- 
Let's organize this thing and take all the fun out of it.