[ale] Permission hell question

[Vincent Fox]

We learn fastest from our screwups.

I wiped out the home drive on a server I was n00b admin for
within my first week of root access. Had to stay up all night
recovering from tape, but I sure did learn about being careful
from the root shell!

> Someone (Dow?) wrote that the safest way for beginners is to
> su to root and mount/copy from there.  I would posit that
> beginners should NOT be given the suggestion to act as root 
> unnecessarily as a mistyped command can do enormous damage.