For the fellow geeks who need a giggle

[oddball42.livejournal.com]

From: root [mailto:root@localhost.localdomain]
Sent: Monday, October 14, 2002 8:48 AM
To: Dave Douglas
Subject: Boggle your mind


It might be me but when trying to install a program isn't it desirable to
be logged in as root?

[root@localhost linux]# ./runInstaller

The user is root. Oracle Universal Installer cannot continue installation
if the user is root.
:No such file or directory

for those of you who are not linux savvy, root is the account that should generally be in use for installing software.

Comments

[alierak.livejournal.com]

Hrm. There are plenty of reasons not to install software as root, and even if you do, not to have it run as root after installation. The idea is that you're taking a risk whenever you run any potentially buggy software, and you can reduce the potential consequences by running the software from a less privileged account. This can be critical for network daemons (where someone posts an exploit on bugtraq and suddenly you're taking a much bigger risk), and also explains why people like to chroot them.

Note, this is fine in theory, but in practice even breaking into an unprivileged account can be useful due to other potential bugs that allow escalation of privilege.

But, heh, for an installer to refuse to run and print an uninformative failure message, that's funny. If Oracle wants you to do something to improve security because they're not confident in their own product, you probably ought to listen to them :)