[ale] Root vs Normal User

[Christopher Fowler]

I don;t intend to start a flame war I just intend to talk about my
circumstances and why I chose not to run as root.   You guys can do
whatever you want. 

On Tue, 2005-05-24 at 09:17, James Sumners wrote:
> Here we go again...
> 
> On 5/24/05, Christopher Fowler <cfowler at outpostsentinel.com> wrote:
> > Running root does not kill the box.  The person running as root will.
> > 
> > I used to run as root.  Then I fubared an AIX RS/6000 because I ran tar
> > in the root directory.  Being a normal user would have saved me.  We
> > were down for 6 hours because of my mistake.  A UNIX box does not assume
> > the user is an idiot like Windows.  There are no confirmation dialogs
> > for rm, tar, and others.  A UNIX box will do exactly what you tell it to
> > do.  This is why you do not need to be root unless you are doing
> > administration to the box.  Linespire allowing root would scare me.  If
> > I was the support manager there I would be scared that my calls would
> > actually increase.  The whole idea of not running as root is not for
> > protection from hackers on the outside but for the protection from the
> > users on the inside.
> > 
> > Why is sudo not good enough?  If you need to run some program as root
> > then use sudo.  That is what it was designed for.
>