Root

[Longman, Bill]

> Can anyone explain to me why some applications require that 
> you login as 
> root, and will not run as "su"?
> 
> httpd, apachectl and pdisk come to mind. It seems like a bit 
> of a security 
> faux-pas to _require_ that you login to root to run them. 
> (plus, I'm going 
> to get around to adding my own user id to the sudo account 
> but that's not a 
> high-priority so I haven't bothered reading through that FAQ).

Some processes require a terminal session. I can understand that pdisk needs
it but I know for sure that httpd and apachectl don't need it. You can "su
-c apachectl shutdown" all you want. That's how the system's init scripts
work. 
 
[DANG IT! I JUST HIT THE STUPID POWER BUTTON ON MY KEYBOARD!!!! Is there a
way to turn off this stupid-ass button so my giant FAT FINGER won't
accidently tell my machine to go to sleep? It's unable to recover from such
a simple request and now my macho uptimes are back to square one! SUGAR
HONEY ICED TEA!@!!~]

> PS Where can I find a log that might record kernel panics?

In the CPU's ring buffer? About the only way to get this is to configure the
kernel to save the running image to disk. By definition, the kernel is
panicking, so it has to bail out. If it cannot write files, you'll never see
the panic info. Maybe you'll need a camera to take screen shots!