For our purposes, being root is fine. The only reason I even bother is
that we nice the process being run in the script so that it has priority
(we're dealing with a soft realtime system). If the user's not root, I'd
rather have it fail with a graceful message than a permission denied.

-DMZ

On Wed, 2005-10-12 at 12:08 -0400, Rob wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 12, 2005 at 10:41:48AM -0400, Joe Barrett wrote:
> > While Rob is completely right, you may also want to check if `id -g` ==
> > 0 as well.  I'm not sure what purpose you're using the script for, but
> > sometimes an intruder may add themselves to the root group instead of
> > just giving themself the root account, to escape detection.  And if no
> > other reason, you never know when someone's odd setup may involve a
> > non-root user in the root group.
> 
> [this conv is moving OT; sorry ;-)]
> 
> You've lost me Joe.
> 
> Group root doesn't have much privileges: it can't open arbitary files,
> bind low ports, etc...  Why would an attacker add himself to group root
> instead of a uid=0 account?  The only thing about group root is there
> might be programs that only people in group root can run and be setuid
> (i.e., perm 4750 or similar), and a quick check on my system (Fedora 3),
> such a thing doesn't exist.
> 
> - Rob
> .
> 
> 
-- 
David Zakar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

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