Re: Why not change ownership in all Linux to user?

[Alan Mead <adm ipat com>]

>WHY NOT CHANGE THE OWNERSHIP OF EVERYTHING IN LINUX FROM ROOT TO SHER?

Many services are picky about the owner and permissions of the files.
These services are not all necessary for you (INN jumps to mind) but you
would probably break something important.

The better thing to do would be to change everything to root owner and run
as root (that's the rough analog with non-multi-user systems) but I believe
that would also break things (maybe nothing critical).  You might need to
allow root to telnet and ftp.

Obviously, you are making the box hopelessly unsecure by doing this...

IM(sincerely)HO, there are probably more accepted and acceptable means of
doing whatever it was that caused you so much grief.  I would attempt not
to ever switch to root to do something except administrative tasks.  For
example, if you need to mount something and you find you cannot do so as
sher, then set up sudo or something else to let you access the resource
rather than becoming root to do so.
---
Alan D. Mead  /  Research Scientist  /  adm ipat com
Institute for Personality and Ability Testing
1801 Woodfield Dr  /  Savoy IL 61874 USA
217-352-4739 (v)  /  217-352-9674 (f)