Be A Man, Run As The Root Account

This is easily the lamest thing I've seen in the top ten of Hacker News.

EDIT: My mistake, it turns out Sarah Palin's emails are also in the top ten right now.

On a single-user machine, screwing up as root and screwing up in your unprivileged account is pretty much the same, since the most valuable you're going to loose isn't that 20 minute Ubuntu install, but your files. And the user you use, privileged or not, will have the power to wipe your files out.

Only other benefit (apart from all those programs that will complain or actually refuse to run as root) is if you run something questionable, it won't be able to install a root-kit, open a backdoor and hide the process.

And, of course, taking advice from a Web page with a giant, obnoxious interstitial ad is always a good idea..

The article is probably a link-baiting joke, but assuming for a moment that it is not, you can get the same benefits without the requirement to run as root.

I don't use sudo to run just any command as root. Making the ability to run a root command as easy as tacking a "sudo" on the front is barely safer that running as root. Especially considering that if someone breaks your user password and you use sudo for everything, they may as well have broken root. Instead, I simply use "su", enter the root password, and have a root terminal. When I'm done, I log back out of the root shell. I also disallow logging in as root over SSH (for whatever reason, this is not the default behavior). Thus, to break root, someone has to break both my user (knowing both the username and the password) and my root password.

This gets old, so I do have sudo installed. You can use sudo to allow a non-root user to run certain commands with root privileges (just be sure NOT to include the

  %wheel ALL = (ALL) ALL

line, which is how most people use sudo). For common commands that don't pose much of a security risk, you can add a line as follows to /etc/sudoers:

  username ALL = NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/emerge, /usr/sbin/hibernate, [etc.]

Then, in my ~username/.bashrc, I have:

  alias emerge="sudo /usr/bin/emerge"
  alias hibernate="sudo /usr/sbin/hibernate"
  [etc.]

(Note: emerge is basically Gentoo's apt-get, but vastly different, of course.) Thus, from the point of view of a standard user, I can run my most common root commands (with root privileges) as my unprivileged user, transparently. I can be careful to only allow commands that will not compromise my entire machine in the event that someone gains access with my username or I find myself drunk at the terminal.

This is great humor - I ran as root while I was learning how to use slackware waaay back. Now I use Fedora because I'm lazy but don't worry behind the PECL and LIVNA libraries I still do a make && make install from time to time.

I think for a noob, running as root is probably wise, understanding chmod, and chown right off the bat is a tough one - and often people get so frustrated from the inability to change settings they give up.

Either way - Batman runs as root... thats good enough for me.

I don't know about other people, but when I click on this link I see the article for about three seconds, then the page fades to an advertisement that has no apparent way to get back to the article.

I assume they didn't test it against Firefox 3 with popular extensions, because it's otherwise the worst thought-out advertising service I've seen online.

Sorry, this is silly. You're (almost) always better off running as a regular user and using sudo. In the worst case you can sudo su. Suggesting that linux newbies run as root is poor advice.

in default install, OpenBSD never asks you to create user

The first-ever boot you can only log in as root

This 'reckless (read: diff from linux distro)' installation practice made OpenBSD got 1 point deducted from a linux review article

Despite the root thingy, OpenBSD is "Only two remote holes in the default install, in more than 10 years!"

This is probably the best advice for linux/unix nubs; you will never learn what a computer is really for until you meet the machine face-to-face via a terminal. I don't know how many times it took me to corrupt my package-manager or butcher some config file until I realized the advantages of running a VM, but, yes, the article is spot-on because all learning, or understanding for that matter, is iterating failure.

This is irresponsible. For the same reason why one drives the speed limit, and only exceeds them when one has to, like, for example, if Rosemary is about to birth the anti-Christ in the back seat of your new Jag,so to does one not run as super user unless one has to. Both practices are dangerous.