On 04/18/2013 10:52 AM, Joe Landman wrote: > On 04/18/2013 10:37 AM, Ellis H. Wilson III wrote: > > [...] >> Please note: I NEVER run as root, I just "tinker" as root. I don't >> think there is ever a good reason to run as root. But having and using >> root is not so evil as you claim. In particular, I have NO doubt you >> require root to build JackRabbits, but I doubt you claim you are "one >> misstep from misfortune." You're probably just careful. > > Ahhh ... strawmen. Don't purposely misread/misconstrue what I wrote.
I didn't intend to, nor do I believe I misread or misconstrued what you wrote. My apologies if I really did, and I'm not seeing it. I originally said I needed root access for my research as a systems researcher, and you followed up with a response basically pointing out one particularly bad grad student who went to the ends of the earth to get root and for uncertain reasons and then broadly claimed nobody but sysadmins should have root. To use your example, this is kinda like running down the stairs with scissors and cutting yourself and then claiming nobody should use scissors just because you got cut. No, just carefully walk down the stairs with them, if you must bring them at all. And speaking of cutting oneself, I exclusively run Gentoo Linux and in the past ran Linux From Scratch as my main distribution. So I've got plenty of scars to prove I've not always been careful with root. I'm ok with that. Scars make for interesting stories. > I am talking about handing root to grad students/postdocs/profs who then > effectively integrate it into their work processes to do things that are > better done outside root. Most of the examples you gave are better done > with sudo, and sudo has emerged as a "best practices" scenario ... its Sudo is fine. I use sudo sometimes, depending on the situation. I nevertheless consider root effectively equivalent to sudo. If you want to talk about straw, that's the fence that sudo erects to protect you against you doing stupid shit with super user permissions. Log in as root, do your work, and log out. It's that simple. As long as you take a deep breath and say, "Alright, now I'm root" outloud, I consider it just as safe, and a good deal more convenient for longer sessions, than sudo,sudo,sudo,sudo,etc,etc,etc. Doing the latter has occasionally resulted in me subconsciously prepending commands with sudo. That scares the living daylights out of me far more than a conscious session as root. > I am also not talking about systems setup, which is, naturally, a > destructive process to things below it. That is a strawman at best. Then your response to my email, where I clearly stated "this is particularly true in my case as a systems researcher" is confusing to me. Why respond to a strawman case, and exclude consideration of the strawman? > I am guessing your work doesn't involve a great deal of support. Support in grad school? Nope. Not really. Not to do what I need to do, at least. If you are referring to if I have to support someone, well, that's also a big no. So your point is taken, but my point was more geared at standard support personnel -- not really an over-busy business owner who tries to do everything from architecture design to OS tuning to software dev to support. If anything Joe, you're the strawman here :D. I know plenty of other grad students in systems, but no other CEOs like you... Best, ellis _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
