few ideas how to make fedora better as a desktop

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 12:54 PM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
> Will Woods wrote:
>  >
>  >
>  > Now that I do some research I see that /sbin has not been in the normal
>  > PATH as far back as RHL9 and probably going back to RHL6 or earlier. I
>  > think it's just Always Been Like That. So there's no discussion and no
>  > convincing argument.
>
>  I'm sure it was that way in RH6, probably 4 - and confusing people even
>  then.
>

The /sbin paths have never been in a normal user as far as I can tell
(from 3.0.3 days). The reason is that $(FOO)/sbin was meant to locate
system administrator specific commands versus normal user commands.
This is from the System VII days I think. On some systems a system
administrator could make sure that these commands could not be
executed by normals with a simple:

chmod 0750 /sbin /usr/sbin

with only people in the specific wheel or in the root group able to
get there. This would lock down setuid programs.


-- 
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"