Christopher Sawtell wrote: >On Wednesday 19 May 2004 17:35, Don Gould wrote: > > >>Why shouldn't I compile as root? >> >> >Because one day, either directly, or indirectly using a Trojan of some kind, >somebody is going to attempt to do something nasty to your machine. Indeed >that person may, accidentally, be you. If you run their hidden program as >root they will get root and have control of your machine. If they are nice >they will only persuade you to run 'rm -rf /' ( Why don't you try it? :-) and >all you will have to do is to reload the file-set, complete with the >invisible trojan, from backup. On the other hand they may well have a much >more insidious criminal intent, and you will end up attempting to explain to >a very suspicious Mr. Plod that you did not do what you appear to have done. >As a minimum, you'll end up having to find several thousand Reserve Bank >purchasing tokens to pay for the excess ip traffic. > >On the other hand if you have only user privileges they can only damage that >which is in your home directory. The Linux system itself is unharmed. > >For more comprehensive explanations see what Google has to say on the matter:- > >http://www.google.co.nz/linux?q=%22compile+as+root%22&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&start=0&sa=N > >IOW: Just don't do it. EVER, or read mail, or do the IRC thing, as root. > > > Is there a way to avoid this then?
$ emerge -u world emerge: root access required. Cheers Col.
