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| Author |
Message |
| 25 new of 122 responses total. |
keesan
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response 57 of 122:
| 
Dec 21 02:12 UTC 2006 |
Where would a rogue program come from and what is it?
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cross
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response 58 of 122:
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Dec 21 03:02 UTC 2006 |
It could come from anywhere. The `rm' command, if used without caution as
root, could become a `rogue' program.
|
ball
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response 59 of 122:
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Dec 21 03:09 UTC 2006 |
That's a good point: Running as a user helps to protect you
not just from other systems or people with hostile intent,
but also from yourself. rm * in the wrong directory is a
great example of that.
|
ball
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response 60 of 122:
|
Dec 21 03:22 UTC 2006 |
It also provides more protection from a userland application
that loses its mind.
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keesan
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response 61 of 122:
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Dec 21 04:18 UTC 2006 |
But I have an identical computer next to this one linked by ethernet cable.
And I could also just copy everything to another partition here. It is a 10GB
drive and my linux fits fine in 1GB or less. I keep what I have compiled at
a shell account.
|
ball
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response 62 of 122:
|
Dec 21 05:03 UTC 2006 |
If they're separate partitions on the same disk, or even
seperate disk drives connected to the same computer, then
they provide no significant redundancy (since an errant
program, run as root can simply erase all connected disks).
Having an identical computer connected via a network cable
is a handy thing (I do something similar myself), but if
they're running the same system software, they're going to
share any vulnerabilities that it has. In your case
replacing the data may be trivial, but for most people that
is probably not the case. Besides, isn't it a bit like
saying "I don't lock my front door because I have home-
owner's insurance"?
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maus
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response 63 of 122:
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Dec 21 05:05 UTC 2006 |
Keesan, I have fat fingered a single "." into "..". The guy who hired me
at my current job has still never lived down a "chmod -R 600 .." instead
of "chmod -R 600 .", which made everything in the entire machine
unreadable by anyone except root and unexecutable by anyone including
root. Had he been running as his normal login, he would have done very
little damage, but because he was using the root login, he and a
colleague wound up having to reimage the server and restore settings and
data from backup, which is a royal P.I.T.A.
|
cross
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response 64 of 122:
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Dec 21 14:15 UTC 2006 |
Sindi, you can do what you want. But like I said, it might bite you in the
ass. If you don't care, then great, I really have *no* interest in trying
to convince you otherwise, but it is bad form.
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keesan
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response 65 of 122:
|
Dec 21 16:38 UTC 2006 |
Most of what I do in linux is not doable by user. The only damage I have done
is crashing things, and e2fsck fixed it all but once (when I think the drive
was bad). I read email and browse mostly in DOS (kermit, lynx, pine). And
replacing the contents of a house is a lot different from copying software
between computers, which I do every time I change drives anyway.
I don't want to have to change write permissions on a bunch of directories,
or write only to one directory with subdirectories, wastes time.
I discovered iwlist (on the card that supports it) shows 8 available
connections. I need to compile a newer pcmcia module for the other card to
work with iwconfig. I have the source code. Do I uncompress it into the
pcmcia source code directory and make all again? Can I make just the one
module and if so how? I think udhcpc (a small dhcpc) can choose between
connections by address with -r .
|
ball
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response 66 of 122:
|
Dec 21 18:11 UTC 2006 |
I live inside my computer ;-)
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gull
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response 67 of 122:
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Dec 21 18:43 UTC 2006 |
Re resp:56: I learned not to run as root when I accidentally typed "rm
-rf /usr" instead of "rm -rf ~/usr".
|
remmers
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response 68 of 122:
|
Dec 21 19:04 UTC 2006 |
I would be extremely nervous to run as root all the time. On modern Unix
and Linux systems, I find that the "sudo" command provides a rational
middle ground, providing reasonable protection against unfortunate
accidents while not requiring a full-blown root login every time I want to
do something requiring administrative privileges.
|
cross
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response 69 of 122:
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Dec 21 19:21 UTC 2006 |
Sudo has a lot of advantages: among them, it logs commands via syslog. So
if someone does something mistakenly, there is at least a lot which one can
look at to see what happened.
|
cross
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response 70 of 122:
|
Dec 21 19:26 UTC 2006 |
Regarding #32; I wanted to write more about this last week, but was
tremendously busy. This is not universally true; in some contexts, a kilobit
is canonically taken to be 2^10 bits. The wikipedia article, for instance,
includes this interpretation.
|
ball
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response 71 of 122:
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Dec 21 21:36 UTC 2006 |
S.I. says one k is 1,000.
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maus
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response 72 of 122:
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Dec 21 23:07 UTC 2006 |
The problem is that both pow(10,3) and pow(2,10) are correct, depending
on the context. System Internacional uses it to represent the former,
while computers (which 'think' in base-2 rather than base-10) use it to
refer to the latter. As an approximation, they are close, but the
difference does matter.
|
cross
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response 73 of 122:
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Dec 21 23:10 UTC 2006 |
That's the great thing about standards: there are so many to choose from.
Why is one kilobyte considered to be 2^10 = 1024 bytes? Why do disk vendors
give capacities of hard drives measured in 1k = 1000 bytes, when the
operating system views things as power of two block sizes? Which is more
standard than the other?
I'll grant that the 1,000 bits == 1 kilobit definition is standard, but it
is not universal.
|
ball
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response 74 of 122:
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Dec 21 23:17 UTC 2006 |
10^3 is k, per SI. 2^10 is K, per longstanding convention.
|
ball
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response 75 of 122:
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Dec 21 23:18 UTC 2006 |
Disk vendors don't specify disk capacity in K or k. They
use Gbytes or Mbytes and adhere to the S.I. definitions of
those.
|
cross
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response 76 of 122:
|
Dec 21 23:22 UTC 2006 |
Regarding #74; I don't ever remember seeing that, but maybe I wasn't looking
in the right places.
Regarding #75; Actually, if you want to pick nits, they do: the G or M or K
just refers to 9, 6, or 3 as an exponent for 10. So, technically, Gbytes are
in the same equivalence class modulo 10. But my point was that disk vendors
rate their products in terms of powers of ten, not powers of two. Saying
KB was just convenient, as the kilobyte is essentially the first `real' unit
in common usage after the byte (that is, few people talk in terms of decibytes
or centibytes).
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maus
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response 77 of 122:
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Dec 21 23:48 UTC 2006 |
resp:76
Picking more nits, decibyte is 1/10th of a byte. Dekabyte is 10 bytes.
Of course, with word-lengths in powers of 2 (32 or 64), dekabyte is sort
of an awkward amount of data.
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cross
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response 78 of 122:
|
Dec 21 23:54 UTC 2006 |
My bad.
|
ball
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response 79 of 122:
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Dec 22 00:22 UTC 2006 |
Re #73: k != K
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cross
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response 80 of 122:
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Dec 22 00:29 UTC 2006 |
Like I said, that's the first I've heard of that. Got a citation?
|
ball
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response 81 of 122:
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Dec 22 00:36 UTC 2006 |
K != k just as M != m (M is 1,000,000 and m is 0.001).
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