Adding /sbin and /usr/sbin to everyone's path in F10
Stephen John Smoogen
smooge at gmail.com
Wed Apr 23 19:02:14 UTC 2008
On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 11:18 AM, Lubomir Kundrak <lkundrak at redhat.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 2008-04-23 at 17:01 +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> > On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 07:53:04PM +0400, Dmitry Butskoy wrote:
> > > Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:
> > >> I propose that we add /sbin and /usr/sbin to the path for normal users
> > >> (as well as root) for F10? There are plenty of useful tools in there for
> > >> non-root users (ifconfig, fdisk, parted), and IMHO, any tool which
> > >> assumes the user is root because it lives in /sbin is fundamentally
> > >> broken.
> > >
> > > Perhaps the initial ancient UNIX idea was to isolate unprivileged users
> > > from commands which they cannot run. IOW, to avoid a situation "I've
> > > discovered that there is a command, but why I have no rights to run it?" :)
> >
> > AFAIK the /sbin split was done around the late 80s. First saw it in
> > SunOS. Old (V7 etc.) versions of Unix just had /bin and /usr/bin.
>
> Yep, but it had the administrative commands in /etc. Unless I am
> wrong, /sbin was a new home for them to separate them from configuration
> files.
>
That is my recollection also. It was not in v7 but was in SysV for
the reason you listed. I think SunOS-1 still had a lot of binaries in
/etc. SunOS-2 was completely SysV and moved the items into /sbin,
/bin. One idea was that service binaries could be protected by chmod
etc out of the main path-views so even putting /sbin:/usr/sbin would
not help a non-root user start up their own telnetd on port 9999.
[selinux on the real cheap.]
--
Stephen J Smoogen. -- CSIRT/Linux System Administrator
How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed
in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. "The Merchant of Venice"
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