On Wednesday, 07 April 2004, at 19:01:26 (-0700), Michael A. Peters wrote: > Several administrator accounts (both Windows and OS X are this way) wheel group multiple UID 0 accounts sudo/slide TMTOWTDI. :) > This is always an option with my proposed solution, but what my > solution does is open up options for those who do not want to become > root to install software others can use. Like a teacher in a > classroom running LTSP. > > Could you in that environment create a directory teacher can write > to that students can execute from? yes. But unless it is easy for > the teacher to install software (package management) it is not going > to be a friendly system. How, exactly, would a non-privileged user be able to write to the RPM database files? And how would you keep the provision of these write permissions from allowing corruption or other abuse of the RPM DB? > This is why not everyone can install. Only trusted users - those in > the group with write access to /software (which could be nobody if > the root admin so chooses) What about software that requires special privileges? How are you going to authenticate packages? or verify that a package comes from a trusted source? I wouldn't trust anyone to install software with whom I would not also trust root, because in the end they're the same damn thing. Windows has the problems it has because of its inferior security model. Without that, there wouldn't be a slew of add-on products schools use to keep students from adding www.penthouse.com to the Active Desktop. Your approach strikes me as an attempt to address the problem of end-user ignorance by tolerating it rather than eliminating it. I think you underestimate the mischief of youth, or the blissful ignorance of the educator, or both. Michael -- Michael Jennings (a.k.a. KainX) http://www.kainx.org/ <mej@xxxxxxxxx> n + 1, Inc., http://www.nplus1.net/ Author, Eterm (www.eterm.org) ----------------------------------------------------------------------- "Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you're a mile away, and you have their shoes." -- Ann Brashares, "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" _______________________________________________ Rpm-list mailing list Rpm-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/rpm-list
