Re: Newbie wants Firefox and Tbird

[Kent West <westk@acu.edu>]

Steve Lamb wrote:

>Kent West wrote:
>  
>
>>1. Training oneself not to run things as root is one benefit of sudo, so
>>that you don't mess up when you go to another machine.
>>    
>>
>
>    One presumes when you go to another machine you won't have root.
>
Hmm; I've got two machines here in the house, one of which is more or
less single-user (which I use most of the time), the other is
multi-user. In addition, I have a half-dozen other machines which I
admin. So, I go to lots of machines on which I have root, some of which
are "multi-user" and some of which are not.

I'd rather have a consistent habit across the machines.

But that's just me.

>  Training
>oneself to not run things as root is not a benefit of sudo, it is a benefit of
>training one's self to not run things as root.
>
Which implies that you're firing up an xterm, "su"ing and doing your
command, then exiting out of "su" after each command, never leaving a
terminal window running as root most of the time. The converse would be
that you tend to "run things as root" (such as a terminal window), which
kind of indicates that you're ignoring your own "good practices" training.

>  Oddly enough it was a practice
>in place well before sudo existed.  However did they survive and train
>themselves to do it?
>  
>
By inventing "sudo"?
(It's just a joke ;-) )


>  
>
>>2. Not logging into X as root is another benefit. Running a single X
>>client/app as root is different than running all of X as root.
>>    
>>
>
>    Which does not require sudo.  rxvt, su...
>  
>
Granted. But the original claim which I dispute was not that "other
methods provide similar benefit to sudo"; the claim was that "sudo
provides no benefit on a single-user machine", with which I disagree.

>>3. Logging, provided by sudo, is not merely for the sake of knowing who
>>did what; sometimes it's for who did what when, etc.
>>    
>>
>
>    Which was implicit in my statement that it provides logging; generally
>timestamps are invovled.
>  
>
So, I'm confused. Are you saying that the logging capability of sudo
provides a benefit on a single-user machine (my claim), or not (the
original claim)?

>>I'll grant that there may be considerably less reason to use sudo on a
>>single-user machine, but to claim that there is "*NO* benefit of sudo"
>>is simply incorrect.
>>    
>>
>
>    No, it is an opinion contrary to yours.
>
I stand by my statement. See below.

>  That alone doesn't make it
>incorrect.  However given the above you've not provided compelling arguments
>that sudo provides any benefit to a single user who is de facto admin of his
>own personal box.  Good behaviors are good behaviors regardless of environment
>and simply don't count.
>
>  
>
If 99.9% of the nix-using population finds that sudo does not provide
any benefit on a single-user machine, then I'd concede that sudo has no
benefit on a single-user machine for most people. However, if one
person, anywhere, finds sudo to be of benefit on a single-user machine,
then the claim that there is "*NO* benefit of sudo" is simply incorrect.
(I myself am such a person, so this is not just a hypothetical possibility.)

Of course, the whole point of these recent posts is a "wrangling of
words", being as I objected to the "absoluteness" of the original claim
that sudo provides "*NO* benefit" on a single-user machine. If you wish
to continue arguing that the benefit I find in using sudo on a
single-user machine is in reality no benefit, then I humbly bow out for
the sake of peace, and concede that I could very well be wrong.

-- 
Kent