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Quit yer Whining
Authored by: bmerlin on Feb 20, '03 02:23:17PM

You know, preaching to people on why not to use root is really pointless. If they want to use root, they will. It's really none of your concern.

You don't like using root? Fine. Don't. Screaming about it whenever someone else mentions using it doesn't help.



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Quit yer Whining
Authored by: incongruity on Feb 20, '03 04:59:30PM
You don't like using root? Fine. Don't. Screaming about it whenever someone else mentions using it doesn't help.

Actually, it helped a lot; I didn't really think about some of the points he brought up. Inasmuch as this is a HINTS website, you know, a place where some of us come to learn things that we previously didn't know or hadn't figured out on our own about OS X (including the CLI/ UNIX'ish underpinnings of it, I think that the original poster's comments were infact very helpful. Yours, on the otherhand, was pure flamebait.

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Quit yer Whining
Authored by: bidmead on Feb 20, '03 05:08:09PM

Not to mention the fact that sudo as a command can't properly be tailored to a particular system unless someone on the system has access to /etc/sudoers for editing -- ie, is root.

Any properly managed UNIX system needs root access. The trick is to confine root use only to managing the system, not as a general purpose user.

--
el bid



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Quit yer Whining
Authored by: ashill on Feb 20, '03 06:39:07PM

Mac OS X is configured so that all administrators are placed in the admin (80) group, and the admin group is given sudo privileges in /etc/sudoers. Therefore, administrators can edit /etc/sudoers by "sudo visudo", and can create more groups and assign individual non-admin users or groups whatever sudo privileges they merit (none, by default). If an administrator removes the admin group's permission to edit the config file, root has to be enabled, but that's why you only give admin access to people you trust!

Mac OS X does not need root access to be properly managed because administrators have the privileges to temporarily become root (via sudo) to do anything that needs to be done, and this is without sharing one root password among (potentially) multiple administrators.

-Alex Hill



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