On Thu, Aug 17, 2000 at 02:38:55AM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote: > On Thu, Aug 17, 2000 at 03:27:12AM -0400, Adam McKenna wrote: > > Any user who has a legitimate reason to run ifconfig is a system > > administrator, and thus should have /sbin and /usr/sbin in his path. > > Facilities like /etc/login.defs do discriminate to this fine degree.
Do you mean, "do not discriminate"? > They know two kinds of user, the ordinary kind and root. > > They set the path accordingly. It's called .bash_profile. > With growing attention on capabilities, et al, are we going to tell all > Debian users that we only support system administrators who have root? > This seems short-sighted and contrary to trends in Unix system > administration. Branden, you have a fantastic ability for rewording other people's statements. I suppose we should tell Debian users that only users who know how to modify their PATH will be able to run binaries in /sbin and /usr/sbin without typing the full path. > > A user who is running ifconfig out of curiosity is not a systems > > administrator, and does not need to have it in his path. > > How do you define curiosity? Running commands at random, or trying to > diagnose a problem so as to send an intelligent problem report to the > responsible personnel? I don't want anyone who doesn't know how to modify his path troubleshooting a system I admin. They're likely to misdiagnose the problem, overreact to the problem, or perhaps even assume a problem where none exists. At an old job, we once had a user complaining that his network wasn't working because he couldn't ping www.microsoft.com, not knowing that microsoft blocks ICMP echo requests. --Adam
