bin owns stuff

[Chris Torek]

>In article <8481 at smoke.ARPA> gwyn at smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn) writes:
>>The basic idea is to avoid forcing the system administrator to act under
>>UID 0 unless absolutely necessary.  Files owned by "bin" can be updated
>>by "bin" rather than "root".

In article <21879 at sgi.SGI.COM> vjs at rhyolite.SGI.COM (Vernon Schryver) writes:
>Should anyone besides root be allowed to 'update' sh or crontab?

Probably not; bin and root are (effectively) the same user.  (That NFS
does not make this so is not directly relevant, as 4.3BSD and
4.3BSD-Tahoe do not come with NFS---not from Berkeley, at any rate.
That the .rhosts mechanism does, is.)

>Is there some <<risk>> with root owning things?

Yes.  It is relatively small, but it is there.  The problem is that
a typographic error as root can have much more far-reaching consequences
than one as bin.

(Besides, I think it is more aesthetic :-) )
-- 
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci Dept (+1 301 454 7163)
Domain:	chris at mimsy.umd.edu	Path:	uunet!mimsy!chris