Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2000 15:28:51 +0200 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> To: "Jacques A. Vidrine" <n@nectar.com> Cc: Paul Murphy <pnmurphy@home.com>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Traditional UN*X conventions (Or: Why not to login as root?) Message-ID: <20001019152851.A15700@lpt.ens.fr> In-Reply-To: <20001018235952.E470@ophelia.nectar.com>; from n@nectar.com on Wed, Oct 18, 2000 at 11:59:52PM -0500 References: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0010150739480.59649-100000@spaz.huntsvilleal.com> <Pine.SOL.3.96.1001016133315.4098A-100000@utah> <20001017035437.B537@hand.dotat.at> <39EE53E0.AC0226FA@home.com> <20001018235952.E470@ophelia.nectar.com>
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A different sort of root screwup story:
Being used to the "killall" command in FreeBSD and Linux, when I
wanted to kill some process (may have been sendmail) on a Digital
Unix machine I happily typed "killall -TERM sendmail" as root,
and the machine basically locked up and the only thing to do was
reboot the machine... Nothing got damaged, but someone who'd been
running a long simulation was pretty unhappy...
The worst part is that the killall manpage (on linux and freebsd)
*warns* against this:
Be warned that typing killall name may not have the
desired effect on non-Linux systems, especially when done
by a privileged user.
(The above was taken from a FreeBSD 3.4-STABLE manpage. If it hasn't
been done already, maybe the "non-linux" reference should be modified
a bit? I don't have access to a newer release of FreeBSD to check.)
I've been quiet on the list because I've been busy with other things,
and have moved halfway around the world (to Paris), and no longer have
administrative access on a local FreeBSD machine. That may change,
but not anytime soon. Any FreeBSD users located near me? My French
is pretty bad, but improving slowly...
Rahul.
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