On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 11:47 AM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Don't confuse permission to access the things the programs
typically
affect with the finding the programs in your PATH. No one is suggesting
that the concept of root authentication should go away. Just that the
difference between doing "su' and "su -" be less confusing and that
typing ifconfig should show a user his ip address, not
bash: ifconfig: command not found
There are more subtle issues here as well. Sure some individual binaries
are useful if you arent the administrator. How many binaries in /*/sbin/ are
currently still setuid root? Do we need to continue to take some care with
those binaries by giving local administrators a way to easily wall off those
binaries in a directory that users can't get to by setting strict directory
access permissions?
If we are going to clean things up and stop separating the path with an
intent to give access to things to users, we need to take a harder look at
this all the binaries, not just the few we know are useful for informational
purposes.
-jef