From owner-freebsd-chat Thu Oct 19 6:29: 1 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from nef.ens.fr (nef.ens.fr [129.199.96.32]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E948E37B479 for ; Thu, 19 Oct 2000 06:28:55 -0700 (PDT) Received: from corto.lpt.ens.fr (corto.lpt.ens.fr [129.199.122.2]) by nef.ens.fr (8.10.1/1.01.28121999) with ESMTP id e9JDSrM57063 ; Thu, 19 Oct 2000 15:28:53 +0200 (CEST) Received: from (rsidd@localhost) by corto.lpt.ens.fr (8.9.3/jtpda-5.3.1) id PAA16360 ; Thu, 19 Oct 2000 15:28:51 +0200 (CEST) Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2000 15:28:51 +0200 From: Rahul Siddharthan To: "Jacques A. Vidrine" Cc: Paul Murphy , freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Traditional UN*X conventions (Or: Why not to login as root?) Message-ID: <20001019152851.A15700@lpt.ens.fr> Mail-Followup-To: "Jacques A. Vidrine" , Paul Murphy , freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG References: <20001017035437.B537@hand.dotat.at> <39EE53E0.AC0226FA@home.com> <20001018235952.E470@ophelia.nectar.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: <20001018235952.E470@ophelia.nectar.com>; from n@nectar.com on Wed, Oct 18, 2000 at 11:59:52PM -0500 X-Operating-System: FreeBSD 3.4-STABLE i386 Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org 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. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message