On Sunday 02 February 2003 14:10, FemmeFatale wrote: > My b/f is a windows MCSE. Fine. In windows you run as root anyway. Even > on 2k I run as an Admin. > > Now he says he sees no diff from that to running as Root in linux. > > I can't give him any better argument for not doing so other than its > insecure (he doesn't care about that on a home compy) & that you can reall > botch Xwindow. Botching that doesn't faze him either cause he'll just > reinstall anyway. > > Help?? Convince him? pls? Thx
Well, I don't think I can make much of an argument. On the Windows side it's too inconvenient to log in as a regular user without having full-time admin-level rights to do the occasional admin-level task. It's not as easy, that I've discovered, as it is in Unix. Unix provides both the su and sudo commands that allow a regular user to become root temporarily to perform a function or two, but the user doesn't have those functions all the time. In the occasional instance when something potentially dangerous could be done without the operator's full awareness, not being root can be a system saver. I learned from experience that being a regular user and entering a command like "rm -rf /" will result in permission denied errors, but doing the same as root is catastrophic. Sure, most of us won't enter such a command, but if you're cwd is /tmp/crap and you MEANT to enter "rm -rf ./*" but forgot the dot, you won't realize it until it's too late. You may not be able to convince your friend that operating as root is a bad thing, he may just have to experience it for himself. I hope he listens to you, though, because I think I'd rather kick myself in the peaches and banana than erase all my files.
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