Installing 4.3-Tahoe on a VAX
Lyndon Nerenberg
lyndon at ncc.Nexus.CA
Wed Sep 14 03:27:14 AEST 1988
In article <5415 at zodiac.UUCP> jordan at ads.com (Jordan Hayes) writes:
[ In reference to bin vs root ownership of executables ]
>Yes, i'd like to hear about why this was (is) being done, in the latest
>BSD releases and the recent SUN releases. It doesn't seem to make much
>sense for some new (unprotected) user to own all the binaries.
I prefer this for a couple of reasons. First, I don't have to give
all the application programmers root access to the machine in order
to install their software. Secondly, it can be a real bitch trying
to install software on NFS mounted file systems if you are root. Doing this
as bin doesn't get you mapped to "nobody." Third, if non-priv executables
are owned by bin, it makes it easy to run a find in your bin/lib
directories looking for stuff owned by root. Any differences from a
list of "standard" root owned files can quickly indicate possible
attempts at cracking the box.
Besides, that's the way AT&T does it, and SVR4 is just around the
corner :-)
--
VE6BBM {alberta,pyramid,uunet}!ncc!lyndon lyndon at Nexus.CA
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