----- Original Message ----- From: "hicham" <hichamlinux@xxxxxxxx> To: "For users of Fedora Core releases" <fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Monday, March 29, 2004 10:58 AM Subject: yum yum | hello | | do i have to use yum as root user ? YES. | isn't risky to connect to the net as root ? No, because you are not connecting to the net as root you are running the local application as root. Ok... the root user has special priviledges that allow the user to modify/remove/create/change any file on the system. This includes files that are accidentally changed so even root doesn't have permissions to the file. In the end root is a SUPER user above all users. The bad news... some applications crash once in a while or they have exploits. The problem lies in that when an application is run on the system as root and crashes or gets exploited, a creative person/virus can gain root access to the machine if that non-root user ran the application as root. This is one reason most servcies http etc. now run as lower users than root. yum, up2date, apt, .. etc. need root access to update the files properly on the system. In most cases, you don't have anything to worry about. These applications are not servers or server applications, so if they crash as root they are done and over with, if you ran them as root. If you allowed other users to run them, things would be different and if the application crashed you could be opening up a user to gain root privaledges.... I hope this helps, James Kosin
