At 6:52 PM -0800 1/17/03, Heather Madrone wrote:
I don't see any Unix daemons on my machine (running in single-user mode) that aren't running as root
Are you saying that this is a good thing (:-)?
In any case, on my FreeBSD box, I see some non-root daemons, including apache www named bind portmap daemon sendmail's Queue runner smmsp My personal theory is that no program should run with any more power than it needs to do the tasks it's assigned. I dunno if FreeBSD's root-level daemons all fit this description, however. For instance, why does lpd need to run as root?
... if you're going to play on Unix, it's always a good idea to be mindful of your program's UID. The default's often not what you want, one way or the other.
Quite true, but Mac OS X is being marketed as a mass-market OS, so it may make sense to make the defaults as safe as possible. If a developer really needs her daemon to run as root (or whatever), make her say so explicitly. Otherwise, we'll have a lot of things running as root that don't need anything like that amount of power. -r -- email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; phone: +1 650-873-7841 http://www.cfcl.com/rdm - my home page, resume, etc. http://www.cfcl.com/Meta - The FreeBSD Browser, Meta Project, etc. http://www.ptf.com/dossier - Prime Time Freeware's DOSSIER series http://www.ptf.com/tdc - Prime Time Freeware's Darwin Collection
