Re: grub.conf has disappeared -- FC2 / WinXP-SP2

From: Nico Kadel-Garcia (nkadel_at_comcast.net)
Date: 09/13/04 

Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 08:44:50 -0400

"Paul Lutus" <nospam@nosite.zzz> wrote in message
news:10kaheq75hkkp03@corp.supernews.com...
> L. Mark Bruffey wrote:
>
> > Paul Lutus <nospam@nosite.zzz> wrote in message
> > news:<10k7npol2t9t619@corp.supernews.com>...
> >> L. Mark Bruffey wrote:
> >>
> >> >>
> >> >> Great. You logged on as root, erased your system's entire
> >> >> configuration,
> >> >>
> >> >
> >> > If I erased my system's entire configuration, how come I am posting
to
> >> > you using it right now, hmmmmmmm?
> >>
> >> There are dozens of ways to boot to a system without a valid boot
> >> partition. How exactly does using a rescue CD or floppy invalidate my
> >> remark?
> >
> > I am booting by turning on the system and selecting linux from the
> > hard drive boot blob without using floppies or cd's or usb sticks,
> > etc., etc.
>
> And one hopes you have figured out that you need to stop being root.

Paul? Get off the pony. The problem had nothing to do with his being root,
which he needed to be to install kernels anyway or at least have sudo
appropriately enabled. The problem was the oddness of putting /boot on a
separate hard drive and accidentally unplugging it.

Since installing new kernels is a multiple stage process, and may be varied
by things like needing to edit grub.conf, modules.conf, do the "make
install; make modules_install" and other fun and games, it's tough to do via
sudo unless you make your sudo extremely wide open, which then leaves you
vulnerable to many of the same mistakes that running as root allows.

Yes, folks should operate as root only when necessary, but it's often a lot
faster than doing sudo on individual commands, and it wasn't the source of
his problem. You've made your point, but in this case, it's not really
relevant.

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