[vox-tech] User with root privileges

[Mark K. Kim]

On Sun, 23 Nov 2003, Michael Wenk wrote:

> On Saturday 22 November 2003 06:51 pm, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> > > > but never mind that.  let's talk about something else.
> > > >
> > > > so we have a guy who presumably owns a solaris box.  he wants to
> > > > install something.  i forget what it was.  oracle?  anyway.  he wants
> > > > to do it from an account named "joeschmo", rather than "root".
> > > >
> > > > do you really not see anything wrong with that?
> > > >
> > > > the only person who should be doing that is a hacker.
> > >
> > > Or an oracle DBA/sysadmin... oracle is not installed as root, although
> > > there are 2-3 parts that require you to run a script as root to do
> > > somethings.
> >
> > and you would change a user's UID or GID to do this?
>
> You are not making sense.  You said above that you had a guy that wanted to
> install oracle from an account other than root(which is the way oracle is
> supposed to be installed.)   So you're dinging me for that?  Have you ever
> done oracle installs?  Am I missing something here?

Aiya... This is getting ugly.

He wasn't criticizing the way you install Oracle.  He was sarcastically
pointing out your misunderstanding of his point from the previous post,
which was that the only person that would want to change a user's GID to
root is a hacker.  In Peter's example he mistakenly used Oracle, which
apparently rattled your cage a bit and caused you to miss his point about
the GID.  It was just a lot of misunderstanding so... let's just leave it
at that before it gets more ugly...

> > you ain't administrating any machine that i own, that's for sure!  ;)
>
> Ya know, there's one thing that always makes me laugh, and that's when a non
> professional gets all anal about their home system.  Get a grip, the absolute
> worst thing that can happen is you have to spend an hr or two reloading your
> system.   Its one thing to expend the level of effort to learn about
> something, another thing to just do it cuz you're afraid of being hacked.

Well... I have large archives of files that date back to my junior high
school days... including homeworks, project files from various projects I
undertook, all my diaries, and photos from many of my trips and my past
that's utterly priceless and irriplaceable once gone.  Those are more
important to me than any expensive tech gadgets or collectables in my
possession.  In such case I'm sure you understand how one administers the
computer system can be important to certain people.

-Mark

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Mark K. Kim
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