Re: Is there any way to fix Software Update in Standard user accounts?

On 2008-04-06, Barry Margolin <barmar@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <ft9kc6$iqk$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, billy@xxxxxxx wrote:

Jamie Kahn Genet <lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

So it will run automatically and show installed updates, because both
those things are broken in Standard user account in Leopard on multiple
Macs.

Allowing a non-privileged user to scribble all over the filesystem
would not be very secure, would it?

It would still require you to type an admin username and password before
installing the updates. So what's the problem with allowing it to check
for and download updates automatically?

Whilst it is clear that a non-admin user should be able to do things by
authenticating as an admin user, I can see some sense in not allowing
them to do something which would then cause things to run as admin in
the future when they are not even logged in.

Auto checking for updates is (as I recall) enabled by default when you
install Mac OS X. The first thing I do after installing is run Software
Update as the initial admin user and I turn off auto-updating (I prefer
to do it when *I* decide to). Once the system is all set up I create a
separate admin account and take away admin privs from the main one. If I
ever wanted to enable auto-updating I would do it by logging into my
admin account.

Some people might consider this to be a bug, but others might consider
it to be a bug if you *were* allowed to change the setting by
authenticating from a non admin account. I don't think it is a question
of Apple not doing any testing - more likely it was a conscious
decision.

Ian

--
Ian Gregory
http://www.zenatode.org.uk/ian/
.

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