/etc/root considered useful

[Steve Simmons]

In the former Subject: Re: 4/330 permissions woes

flanagan at milton.u.washington.edu (Jim Flanagan) writes:
>
>I have a 4/330 running 4.0.3 which exhibits the following symptoms:
>
>o The "r-commands" (rsh, rlogin, rcp,...) fail to recognize the proper
>  setup of files like ~/.rhosts, /.rhosts, and /etc/hosts.equiv  . . .

poffen at sj.ate.slb.com (Russ Poffenberger) writes:
>I saw this type of thing once on a Solbourne. At first I called Solbourne
>asking if they had done something in their OS that did it. They couldn't
>resolve it, they said it should work. What it finally turned out to be was
>that the idiot who setup the system (not me) made the root login directory
>in the /etc/passwd file point to /usr/root instead of the normal /. Since
>.rhosts is ONLY checked in the home directory of the user that is trying
>to rlogin, rsh, rcp, etc., it couldn't find it in /usr/root, since we had
>modified the one in /.

Ahem.  Speaking as former scs at admin.aa.cad.slb.com, I have a reasonable
guess as to why your former admin used /etc/root.  There's a number of
good reasons for it:

We had continual problems with operators (and admins :-) leaving files
lying around in /.  The usual cause was wanting some temporary data
storage and forgetting to go to /tmp.  Having a separate home directory
for / fixed that.

We wanted to install some scripts for root/operator usage only and wanted
them available even when (a) the system was in single-user or (b) /usr was
trashed (ever do a full file restore of /, and destroy yourself when
/bin/restore was overwritten?  An extra copy of restore was soon found to
be priceless).  This isn't as important now, but was critical in 3.X days.
A /etc/root/bin directory was the obvious choice.

Reduced directory clutter: all the .login, .cshrc, .rhosts, etc files made
for a cluttered / directory.  The more files were there, the harder it was
to determine what was leftover operator stuff and what was system stuff.

There are some downsides to /etc/root, Russ has described some (but a
simple RTFM fixes the ones he lists).  Somewhat more cumbersome is vipw's
habit of verifying the root account and *only* permitting '/' to be the
home directory.  A quick grab of BSD vipw and a few edits fixed that up
just fine.  Sorry, I don't have the patches -- they're somewhere in the
bowels of aa.cad.slb.com.

Administratively yours,
Steve