Date: Sun, 22 Mar 1998 12:13:58 -0800 (PST) From: Sean Harding <sharding@ophelia.uoregon.edu> To: Sue Blake <sue@welearn.com.au> Cc: freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: root Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980322120505.9242D-100000@ophelia.uoregon.edu> In-Reply-To: <19980322233850.08822@welearn.com.au>
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On Sun, 22 Mar 1998, Sue Blake wrote: > Pretty soon it gets to the part about adding a user for yourself and > not doing everything as root. Now to unix people it makes good sense to > restrict yourself as much as possible, but I've always found that a bit hard > to get used to. There are many issues here. Most of it goes back to the way Unix was designed to be used. You (and everyone) is used to doing as they wish on their own computers, but you haven't been running multiuser operating systems. Unix is designed to expect you to be doing things from a user account. Programs expect you to do things from a user account. Much of the robustness and stability of Unix come from the fact that user processes are restricted. You lose a lot of that by running as root all the time. You also have much less safety net running as root than you do running in something like windows. rm really does just remove the file. No intermediate recycle bin there. mkfs? No "are you really sure?!". Ooops! Unix doesn't want or need to baby you. Some of that comes from the expectation that you won't be root until you *need* to be root. It's also a security issue. If you run your own machine in your home, notnetworked, then it really doesn't make too much difference. But once you get in the habit of running as root, you will have a hard time breaking it. When you end up being the admin of some machine at work (likely if it becomes known that you know about Unix), you are really likely to be causing problems by running as root all the time. Problems for yourself and problems for the company. I understand that this may seem difficult to new users, but it has good reasons behind it. Just as with anything else that is new, there are some things that you need to just take from the people who know more without understanding; the understanding will come later as you learn more. I promise you that if you really get to know Unix, you will shudder at the idea of some poor person running as root all the time ;-) Sean -- "Believe me, the truth is we're not honest. Not the people that we dream." --10,000 Maniacs, "Eden" Sean Harding, sharding@oregon.uoregon.edu http://gladstone.uoregon.edu/~sharding/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
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