Uncontrolled user app installs

Andy Green andy at warmcat.com
Mon Oct 31 19:07:37 UTC 2005


Markus Huber wrote:

> There is nothing wrong with that and a big advantage at a school.
> Windows boxes usually rot away within minutes, because everybody can
> install anything wherever they want, they do not need to be
> root/administrator to do that. And that's wrong.

Caution: there is nothing special about the root-only-writable /usr/*
for compiling, installing and running stuff.  I was surprised to see
Opera running on the Fedora laptop my stepson uses a few months ago...
he just downloaded the binaries, unpacked them in /home and ran them.
Similarly he has compiled .tar.gz's in /home himself and run the
executable in-place.

You can mount /home noexec I guess, but assuming that a typical Linux
box is much better in the "root must install" respect is wrong.

-Andy
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