On Sunday, April 08, 2012 06:46:37 am Morgan Leijström wrote: > söndagen den 8 april 2012 12.54.04 skrev Wolfgang Bornath: > > maybe there is a reason to login to a gui as root - although in > > all my 17 years of Linux I haven't heard one. And I have never heard > > about any sysadmin who did it with a reason. > > Lazyness in my case. Or call it efficiency cause of scarce time. > I want machines to work for me, do not have all hours to learn everything. > > I can not learn everything, even less remember it. > A GUI session often have lots of useable tools to see what is going on, web > browser to read documentation of what i am trying to do, can copy to > virtual terminal, etc. > > That is why even my server always runs KDE (but not as root) > > Um... when i think about it i have not used GUI as root for a year or so, > but it was a time saver in the beginning and i might have given up on > Linux without it. > > This is the few sysadmin hours of an own smalll company owner and home > server.
A quick google of "run x as root" shows up good advice that has existed for a very long time. One example is: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/XWindow-User-HOWTO/xsecurity.html This kind of laziness is dangerous. Even the discipline of not being on the internet at the time is a false fix. Anything that has security issues can modify the security of the local network, install malware, or damage critical files, etc. A shell in non-root X can easily attain root for GUI applications - not just CLI instructions. Sure, it is less direct to look at the GUI menu to figure out how to invoke some of the tools, but it can be a one-time effort that has a side effect of increasing knowledge of the tools one uses to administer a system easily and safely. I am not so much in a different position as you are, and I can probably count on my hands how many times I ran X as root since Mandriva 7.2, and I think that was too many. Kevin Bulgrien
