ianw1974 Posted October 23, 2006 Report Share Posted October 23, 2006 I've written this post as humourous as I can think of right now, but hopefully it gets the point over. This isn't directed at anyone in particular, but more as of an informative and humourous reason not to run your system as root user, than compared to a normal user. In case you don't know, a standard user doesn't have full system privileges, and can only work with their own home directory. The root user has access to the whole system, and can make changes/delete everything. The Story I'm new to Linux, I've not been using it long. In fact, this is my first post on a forum, and since then I've written another 6800 posts with all sorts of problems I'm experiencing. You see, when I was using Windows, I had full admin rights to my system. I could do anything I wanted, anywhere I wanted. When I started using Linux, I found out about normal versus root users, and I didn't like having to type "su" all the time and enter the root password, each time I wanted to make changes to some files, or delete something. I thought I'd do away with the normal user, and just run as root. I had been trying to find out how to make my normal user a root user, but wasn't sure how. I preferred using my name to login with, but I can live with root. It's a bit like Administrator in Windows. Anyway, I was getting short on disk space, so I thought I'd take a look at all my files. This is what I noticed: [ian@esprit ~]$ ls -l / total 18 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 2536 Oct 23 19:09 bin drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 256 Oct 22 13:04 boot drwxr-xr-x 11 root root 4080 Oct 23 15:47 dev drwxr-xr-x 82 root root 5872 Oct 23 19:10 etc drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 128 Oct 22 13:22 home drwxr-xr-x 10 root root 3976 Oct 23 19:05 lib drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 48 Feb 11 2006 media drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 48 Feb 11 2006 misc drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 48 Feb 11 2006 mnt drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 0 Oct 23 15:47 net drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 48 Feb 11 2006 opt dr-xr-xr-x 103 root root 0 Oct 23 17:46 proc drwxr-x--- 4 root root 448 Oct 23 19:06 root drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 5640 Oct 23 19:10 sbin drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 48 Feb 11 2006 selinux drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 48 Feb 11 2006 srv drwxr-xr-x 11 root root 0 Oct 23 17:46 sys drwxrwxrwt 13 root root 600 Oct 23 19:16 tmp drwxr-xr-x 14 root root 360 Oct 22 12:59 usr drwxr-xr-x 19 root root 480 Oct 22 13:40 var I noticed this directory called "bin". I think this must be my user equivalent of "Recycle Bin", so I deleted this as it was taking up some space. I also noticed "sbin", and figured this related to superuser, so must be root's "Recycle Bin". So I deleted this as well. "dev" didn't look to big, but I don't do development or programming, so I deleted this too. "var" sounds like variables and must be development stuff, so I got rid of this as well. I'm not entirely sure about "etc" but I think it must be additional extras or leftovers, so I figured these could go as well. I noticed "misc" as well and this must be the same as "etc", so that's gone too. I also deleted "srv" as I'm not running any server stuff, and "usr" as well. I don't even have a US Robotics modem, so don't know how that got here! "home" and "media" are important, I know my data is here, and media is where all my music is, so I don't want to be deleting all my mp3's. I managed to get quite a bit of disk space back! A few applications stopped working, and I thought Linux was being typical of Windows, and so I rebooted. But I'm having problems getting my system back up and running, and I really can't figure out why?!? The Facts All directories that I've mentioned in the above story are critical to your system stability. Of course, my story is being a bit extreme, but you never know how true this story could fit. Running as root, you could accidently delete something that is very important. And doing so, could stop you booting your system completely. Just like my ficticious newbie in my story. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reiver_Fluffi Posted October 23, 2006 Report Share Posted October 23, 2006 Good job, you made me laugh :D Gosh, you installed Fedora Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ixthusdan Posted October 24, 2006 Report Share Posted October 24, 2006 Actually, I have seen a part of this happen in a different forum, where a newbie was encouraged to run as root!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reiver_Fluffi Posted October 24, 2006 Report Share Posted October 24, 2006 Actually, I have seen a part of this happen in a different forum, where a newbie was encouraged to run as root!! :wacko: Sorry, that's all I gotta say on that matter :D Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scoonma Posted October 24, 2006 Report Share Posted October 24, 2006 Actually, I have seen a part of this happen in a different forum, where a newbie was encouraged to run as root!! :wacko: Sorry, that's all I gotta say on that matter :D :-) I'd encourage every rookie to run as root only. By this he'd show as newbie, so he could sue the seller of his (proprietary) system on every error he has. Happy days to you! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reiver_Fluffi Posted October 24, 2006 Report Share Posted October 24, 2006 :wacko: Sorry, that's all I gotta say on that matter :D :-) I'd encourage every rookie to run as root only. By this he'd show as newbie, so he could sue the seller of his (proprietary) system on every error he has. Happy days to you! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Helmut Posted October 24, 2006 Report Share Posted October 24, 2006 Ha Ha Ha! That was a good one! Helmut Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ramfree17 Posted October 25, 2006 Report Share Posted October 25, 2006 hey ian, try moving the bin and sbin portions at the end. if he deleted it first then he wont have anything to delete the other 'space-wasting' directories. :) but good read nonetheless. :) ciao! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted October 25, 2006 Author Report Share Posted October 25, 2006 Yeah, I should have made a test system to try it all out to make sure I got the story in order ;) :lol: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ramfree17 Posted October 25, 2006 Report Share Posted October 25, 2006 Yeah, I should have made a test system to try it all out to make sure I got the story in order ;) :lol: virtualization is good for this sort of thing. ;) ciao! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
theYinYeti Posted October 25, 2006 Report Share Posted October 25, 2006 You don't have to be a newbie to do stupid things :lol: When I upgraded from 2006 to 2007, there was a problem, mostly due to the upgrade process getting lost because of packages from MDE repository. The most immediate problem was that glibc could not update... To make the story short, I thought I'd just force-remove the old glibc, and then install the correct one, and finally continue the upgrade process from there... # rpm -e --nodeps glibc ... # urpmi glibc urpmi: command not found # rpm -i /tmp/glibc...rpm rpm: command not found # ls ls: command not found You get it... That was a cool rescue practice I got :lol: Anyway, I got the system back up and running (and rpm database cleaned). Yves. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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