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10.3: Make Palm HotSync work in Panther
I am a firm believer in the tennant that everyone is a master of their own machine. Sure, I'm not arguing against that. But just because it's possible to turn off the safety net that a disabled root account gives you doesn't mean it's wise to do so, even if you're a very competent admin of your own machine. The account is disabled as a safety mechanism -- protecting you from yourself, protecting you from malicious intruders, and protecting the world from misconfigured systems. Sometimes, things you want to do require escalated priviliges, but circumventing the protections on root is not the responsible way to acquire those priviliges. Think of the root account like a lockbox or safe -- the box and its contents are yours, but that doesn't mean it makes sense to leave it open all the time. If a certain fix seems to work when logging in as root, then I'm going to publish it. And that is what seems irresponsible to me. In every case I've read where a tip on this site tells the user to log in as root, it's almost always safer, easier, and even faster to do the same thing with sudo or Pseudo. I'm not saying not to publish the hints -- they're a great resource! But I am saying that, as a responsible editor, the responsible thing to do would be to edit them. If the hint submitter suggests using root without justifying it, consider having the submitter rewrite the hint using sudo or Pseudo. If the submitter can't or won't make the change, consider doing it yourself. But please, please please don't run sloppy advice like this -- it dilutes the quality of the site for those who have been burned by such advice in the past. Notice that I did not explain how to login as root, how to enable the root password, or any of that other stuff. If one has figured that out for themselves already (yes, it's all documented here), then they're perfectly capable of deciding whether they want to risk a root login to fix their problem or not. This is where I disagree most strenuously. Advice about how to enable the root account gets passed around so much out of what seems to be nothing more than ignorance about better, safer ways to do things. Just because someone figured out how to turn on root does not mean they know what they're doing -- chances aren't bad that they're just cargo culting a bad habit they picked up from some HOWTO site that also didn't know any better. I know how to pop my car's hood. I do not know how to change the transmission. That doesn't mean that I couldn't learn, or that I might not have a good reason to have to try it some day, but just because I might, someday need to be able to rebuild my transmission does not mean that it makes any sense for me to leave the hood off all the time just in case I feel like poking around at some future date. For that matter, it seems like skilled mechanics also leave their cars' hoods closed most of the time. Curious, eh? Logging in as root isn't good. And with apps like Pseudo, it may not even be required. But my job here is to try to document ways of doing stuff in OS X, and this particular example denotes a solution that requires logging in as root. But that's the thing -- did the essential quality of this hint depend on the user turning off the safety check of the disabled root account, or was there some safer way to do this? Clearly, there were other, better, ways to do it. Running bad advice can be almost as bad as running no advice at all. Maybe I'll just start adding an obligatory root tag line: "Logging in as root can be dangerous and many people claim it's never necessary. Procced at your own risk, assuming you've already figured out how to enable root." That would be a fair start, but as I say above, an even better approach would be to actively discourage hint submitters from advocating such behavior. Like I say, almost every hint I've seen that suggested using root could easily be rewritten in such a way that the same task can be accomplished without putting the user's system security at such risk. Like I said in my earlier post, the burden of proof should be on anyone advocating such unrestricted use of the root account. Such legit uses may exist, but I can't think of any, and I've been a sysadmin for a while now. With such easy & safe options as sudo and Pseudo, I have a hard time seeing why people keep advocating the much riskier, much more archaic alternative of an unrestricted root account. ---- My I wrote a lot, didn't I? Well I hope this comes across as constructive, and not just pedantic -- I really do think that the site would be a stronger resource if this kind of irresponsible advice didn't keep getting casually tossed around, and I hope you see how easy it could be to clean up the situation a bit. Please consider it -- thanks. ---
10.3: Make Palm HotSync work in Panther
Constructive tone noted and understood (and after three years, I've learned to take nothing personally! :-). Given the realities of time management and hint submissions, getting authors to re-write their submissions, and explaining why, is simply not feasible. Similarly, I dislike changing what others have written (beyond correcting grammar, spelling, and formatting), so I'm not inclined to change it myself. |
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