You can easily summarize this: whatever task you can do as a non-root user on an Unix system, you should do it as non-root user. Only 'su' when necessary!
Why? Darrick gave a detailed explanation. The same thing also applies to other OSs where the superuser is not called root, but maybe administrator.... regards, Ingmar Darrick Hartman wrote: > Jack wrote: >> And yes Ingmar you are right about not running it as Root but at the >> moment I am just playing around, I promise the finale MAKE build I >> will do as a normal user. >> >> > If you operate buildroot as a root user AT ALL you can cause several > problems. (more below) >> > Last but not least, it looks like you are building as user >> "root". You >> > should not do that for security reasons. >> >> > It's not even security reasons. There are several reasons why you do > not want to run the development environment as root. > > 1). It can mask errors. If a package is accidentally attempting to > write to an area outside of the buildroot (for example it's trying to > write to /etc/init.d instead of ../somepath/to/your/astlinux-dev/), > running as root will allow you to write to those locations. You may > over write important files on your HOSTOS (making it unable to boot) and > you will not have those files in your development environment. > Additionally, you may not know about this, because as root, you have > permission to write anywhere on the disk. > > 2). If you run anything as root (even make menuconfig), you are > modifying files. When you go back to do the same operation later as a > regular user, you will not have the correct file permissions. > > 3). It's good practice (here's where security comes in) to build most > applications as root. Some even check if you are running as root and > quit if you are (courier-imap is one such critter). > > Bottom line is done run as root with the exception of running the > "makeimage.sh" script. Eventually the root user requirement for that > file will be removed as well. > > Darrick > _______________________________________________ Astlinux-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.kriscompanies.com/mailman/listinfo/astlinux-users Donations to support AstLinux are graciously accepted via PayPal to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
