On Wed, 2004-05-19 at 19:41, Dale Anderson wrote: > gentoo's broken to start with a few root install's aint going to hurt ;p
care to explain? then the flames may proceed... > > /me adorns flame suit > > Dale. > > On Wed, 19 May 2004 19:20, Col wrote: > > Slosh wrote: > > >On Wed, 2004-05-19 at 18:50, Col wrote: > > >>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. > > > > > >This is something nifty someone showed me a while ago that most people > > >here probably already know about, so I'll get here first :D. > > > > > >I usually just run as a normal user and then use > > > > > >$ su -c "<some command>" > > > > > >when I need to do something as root. It will run just the command inside > > >the "". Unfortunately it doesn't support auto-completion inside the > > >quotation marks. > > > > True, but emerge is still going to compile the gentoo updates as root. > > > > Col.
