From owner-freebsd-questions Tue Mar 4 19:41:36 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id TAA19878 for questions-outgoing; Tue, 4 Mar 1997 19:41:36 -0800 (PST) Received: from alwan (l31.rma.edu [207.0.141.31]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id TAA19871 for ; Tue, 4 Mar 1997 19:41:23 -0800 (PST) From: Michael.Alwan.alwan@rma.edu Received: from alwan (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by alwan (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id WAA00286 for ; Tue, 4 Mar 1997 22:40:31 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: X-Mailer: XFMail 0.4 [p0] on FreeBSD Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit MIME-Version: 1.0 Date: Tue, 04 Mar 1997 22:18:33 -0500 (EST) To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: group and user confusion Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk ---------------------------------- E-Mail: Michael Alwan alwan@rma.edu Date: 03/04/97 Time: 22:18:33 This message was sent by XF-Mail ---------------------------------- To all: I'm getting really confused about groups and users. I've been logging in as roo t, setting up xwindows, etc. Now I see that my mail, news, and browser cache have filled up the root director y, and I understand there are other problems that will arise too doing everything as root. This is a single-user ma chine, so security is not an issue. So I created another user in the group wheel, which would presumably give me acc ess to all the configuration files but create caches in /usr/home/"username". However this new user, which id says belongs to wheel, cannot su to root. In addition, I cannot start user ppp while logged in as anything but root. Also, though I think I understand why, I can't start xwindows with xdm except as root. (I need to figure out why startx can't find the symbolic link X to the xserver--the path se ems to be correct). How do I create a usr that can su to root? Should I just bite the bullet and re install everything? Michael