Problems with ordinary user permissions

Nicole nicole at unixgirl.com
Tue Oct 21 17:38:00 PDT 2003



 An example of how spliting BSD into BSD server and BSD desktop could be a
benefit.


 Nicole


On 21-Oct-03 My Homeland Security Spies reported that Terry Lambert said:
> carmoda wrote:
>> ~sigh~
>> 
>> seems like an awful lot of stuffing around for something that a
>> user/developer should be able to access by default *in my opinion*. so
>> far i have about 30% of functionality of my previous W2K system after
>> several times the time required for setup. [as a workstation]
>> 
>> FreeBSD may be 'free' and more stable, but after i add my time to a
>> setup it is over twice the price of XP Pro.
> 
> You charge too much.  8-) 8-).
> 
> 
>> Something HAS to be done on the install front. I did select 'developer +
>> X-windows' in the sysinstall and i think it would make more sense if the
>>   account security was more 'open' for the average user given they would
>> be 'developing' on the platform. i mean, half of my apps didnt work due
>> to permissions being short. again, i did select that i wanted a
>> 'developer - x-windows' install.
> 
> Windows defaults to "everyone on the Internet can write my disk";
> FreeBSD defaults to "only root can write my disk"; OpenBSD defaults
> to "only God can write my disk, and even he needs a 1024 bit key".
> 
> It's all a matter of trading security vs. ease of use.
> 
> For the most part, you should install all software as root, and
> then expect that the software can be configured to "do the right
> thing" as part of the install.
> 
> In general, I would say that most of your problems arise from the
> UNIX security model, and the failure of the software vendors or
> ports maintainers or both to anticipate you using your machine as
> if it's a signle use box.
> 
> FWIW, if you are going to use the machine as a single user box,
> you probably want to create your user as uid 0:0, even if the name
> is not actually "root", and then auto-login the user without a
> password into something like a KDE environment.
> 
> Then the console user owns all the hardware, and there's no issues
> for single user use that need you to go to root to resolve.
> 
> -- Terry
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