On Wed, 2003-04-30 at 12:09, Xavier Bestel wrote: > > Take the other point of view. What if you use root like your normal user > > account? The hacker gets access to this by the same means he gets access > > to your user account before (probably idiocy in this case?) and not only > > can he turn your HDD into a brick, destroy your data, he can also access > > the user accounts of all the people on your system, and tap all their > > passwords and keypresses for any other systems they use. Now which is > > less secure? > > True, but nowadays PC are just that: Personal Computers, and if a > hacker/trojan/virus breaks in, the only important thing on the disk is > the (only) user's data. He won't care about the system 'cause he can > reinstall it from scratch if need be. And no, 99% of them won't have > fresh backups handy. > To these users, root/user separation is just a bandaid to not hose the > system by accident, nothing more. > > Xav
That's a bit of a narrow slant on things: you're ignoring universities, businesses and managed systems all over the place. The ability of users to change most settings/install random software/infect the machine with viruses is the bane of university systems-administrators everywhere. The fact that a system needs to be rebuilt from scratch whenever a user does something stupid causes more work for IT departments everywhere than is healthy. >From a "personal user" point of view, I keep a number of Linux boxes running for friends and family, none of whom have root access, and as such I know that the worst-case scenario is that they hose their own data. Basically, what I'm trying to get at is that there are two, completely seperate discussions going on here: the first (original) one is whether "root" is outdated/just-a-bandaid, and the second is which information on a computer is important. They are completely unrelated because _whether or not the user has root_ losing his/her personal data is a catastrophe, and totally tangential to that is the question of whether or not those users lose not only their personal data, but also have to reinstall the machine from scratch when they make a mistake. Root may be a "bandaid", but it eliminates 99% of the impact of those stupid mistakes _on the system as a whole_. Moreover, I can't think of a better solution to stopping the user hosing the entire system. To get back to the original intent of the discussion, the question is not really whether root-level-access is a good thing but rather whether enabling it _by default_ in gdm is the right approach. If nothing else, forcing the user to use su/gtksu etc at least lets them know that they _could_ break things. Ciao, Brad.
