Root

[mascarasnake]

Eric D wrote:
> Can anyone explain to me why some applications require that you login as 
> root, and will not run as "su"?

I'll interject some thoughts here.

'su' is more appropriately 'substitute user' and not so much 'super 
user'.  While typing in su followed by your root password gives you 
limited admin permissions, you aren't truly root. As 'su otheruser' 
followed by 'otheruser's password will log you in as 'otheruser' and 
give you access to those files and permissions, you have to pass the '-' 
or '-l' flag to 'su' to gain full root permissions.

in essence, 'su' without the login flag ('-' or '-l') gives you the same 
privileges as sudo does (with the 'ALL=(ALL) ALL' argument in the 
sudoers file).

As far as why some apps require this, I guess that apps like pdisk just 
want to know that you really are "The Man (or Woman)" in order for you 
to use them.

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