Re: Using Mac as Admin

On Sun, 13 Apr 2008 15:38:40 -0500, Jolly Roger wrote:
In article <fttqt2$kc2$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Dave Seaman <dseaman@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Sun, 13 Apr 2008 11:35:45 -0500, Jolly Roger wrote:

When you are logged in as administrator, everything you do, every
program you run (directly or indirectly, purposefully or inadvertently)
is executed with administrative privileges with access to more parts of
the system than normal users. So if you make a mistake, or worse, if you
unknowingly run a trojan / worm in that account, you can damage and
alter critical system files with little or no acknowledgment from the
system. Remember that some files in Mac OS X are owned by the "admin"
user and "wheel" group, of which the administrator account is part. When
you are logged in as administrator, Mac OS X allows you to modify these
files at will.

True in the case of group "admin", but not group "wheel". An
administrator account is a member of group "admin", but not of group
"wheel", at least by default. You can confirm this by using the "groups"
command as an admin, or by attempting to "touch /private/junk" as an
admin, which will give you "permission denied".

Typo. I meant "admin".

I see that you typed "admin" *user*, rather than "admin" *group*, which
is what I read. But there is not necessarily an "admin" user, unless you
choose that name when creating the account.

My point was that all the top-level directories in "/" are group-owned by
either "admin" or "wheel", but only the ones owned by "admin" can be
altered by an admin user without additional authentication. The most
important system directories are protected against accidental
modification.


--
Dave Seaman
Third Circuit ignores precedent in Mumia Abu-Jamal ruling.
<http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/03/29/18489281.php>
.

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