On 2011/03/21 17:07, Christopher A. Williams wrote:
On Mon, 2011-03-21 at 16:46 -0700, Joe Zeff wrote:
...
> As I've been writing this, something interesting has occurred to me: by
> the time I stopped doing tech support for an ISP (Our call center was
> closed and the entire support crew was laid off.) I had been "on the
> phones" longer than anybody else there. I found myself, more and more,
> finding things obvious that nobody else understood or knew, simply
> because none of the other techs had anywhere near my experience.
> Considering how long I've been using Linux, this may well be simply
> another case of my not realizing how different my experience level is
> compared to the rest of the list.
...And for those of us on the list who have been running Linux pretty
much exclusively since Red Hat Linux 4 and earlier (and who use sudo
properly):
def. Hubris (World English Dictionary)
hubris or hybris ('hju:bris)
-n
1. pride or arrogance
2. (in Greek tragedy) an excess of ambition, pride, etc, ultimately
causing the transgressor's ruin
By nature the more "power" you give or Joe thinks he has the more
careful he is. I've seen that in action over many years. He's a good
fellow. (And he has been around computers long enough to have made
all the potentially disastrous errors and learned from them where his
caution has slipped.)
Personally I use sudo for one liners like running "mtr" or restarting
a mail daemon. Otherwise I use "su -l" on one shell screen and do all
the other preparatory work on user screens. So far I've managed to
avoid "rm -rf / etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/foobar" sort of errors.
I consider myself lucky. I also consider taking backups before performing
surgery. (I wish I could do that with this meat I am wearing. {^_-})
{^_^}