Mail Archives: opendos/2002/06/03/11:23:45
On Mon, Jun 03, 2002 at 07:33:43PM +1000, da Silva, Joe wrote:
> more than the standard DR-DOS files, I may as well
> not have bothered to download this, especially if I can
> use my existing DR-DOS partition instead.
That's right. And if you know how to tweak your config.sys, I'll bet you
can make your DOS boot differently under dosemu
> Yeah, I know, the *nix world is very protective of root
> privileges, whereas DOS users take such privileges
> as their natural right. I'm sure I'm not the only user
> from the DOS world that invariably runs as "root".
As you might have guessed, I came from the DOS world as well; that's why
I'm on this list. And although I no longer *use* DOS, you never know if
nor when you might have to use it again. Plus, there are interesting and
talented people here, not to mention the great selection of spam! :O ;)
I had the same thought as you. Harrumph, who is this pissant operating
system to tell *ME* I'm not completely in charge? But I trusted in the
gurus who invariably say "don't do that". That kept me out of trouble,
and eventually I learned why they say that.
It's not just about protecting your OS from yourself -- it's about
preventing many potential problems, many of which you couldn't know
about in advance. The more processes running as root, the more potential
exploits are open on your system.
You know, when I switched from Win95 to NT4, I had the same thought
about their implementation of UNIX-like privilege levels. So I put my
user account in the Administrator group -- totally defeating the
purpose and potential benefit thereof.
However, in NT you have to do that, unless you don't mind logging out
and in and out and in again whenever you need to administer the system.
They provide none of the *nix tools like su, sudo, and SUID. (Typical MS
implementation, where they mess it up.)
> One of the first things I did, after spending two days
> trying to figure out how, was to "SUID" (I think that's
> what it's called) the "shutdown" command. I think
In Slackware, the Ctrl-Alt-Delete keystroke is mapped to a reboot. You
can easily change that to shutdown instead. See /etc/inittab for the
details (and read "man inittab" if yours isn't well-commented.)
That's how I handle shutting down (which is rare, BTW.) I wouldn't SUID
the shutdown binary, because a remote user could do it, even by accident
("Hmmm, what would happen if I typed 'shutdown'?" :) But anyone with
physical access to my machine could shut it down in a number of ways.
I *do* have a few other users on my machine. Notably wife and kids, but
even some external friends who can come in via ssh.
> it's absurd that a "pleb" user can easily hit the reset
> or power switch, yet is by default not allowed to
> shut down the system properly! Strange priorities
> these *nix folks have!
Not so strange when you think of the heritage. UNIX was born of big
mainframes, not PC's. Imagine a mainframe at a university, where you
probably have malicious (or at least mischievous) users. You wouldn't
want your /sbin/shutdown SUID! :)
> Yes, there are MANY favourite programs that I miss
> from the DOS world, like John Whitney's "Visual
> Compare", Peter Norton's "Text Search", DR-DOS's
The dosemu.org site might tell you whether these have been tested. I'm
not familiar with either, however WRT text searching of files, GNU grep
can work miracles. :) Not the best user interface, though.
> > As you can imagine, I haven't made much of an income in this profession.
> > ;) But perhaps someday, I figure.
>
> Your name's not W.G. the III, huh? ;-)
I had to think to figure out what you meant. No, no Gates. AAMOF I
recently participated in a "who's poorest" contest on Usenet, and I
think I "won" it. :) I'll spare you the gory details, but hint that it
can be found in a Google groups search of alt.os.linux.slackware for
"/dev/rob0 churchmice". ;)
Rob - /dev/rob0
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