x_security

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Subject: Re: Linux (x server) stability
From: Dan Lyke <danlyke@flutterby.com>
Date: Sun, 9 Jan 2000 13:05:25 -0800 (PST)


On Sun, 9 Jan 2000, Marc Bernstein wrote:
> There is no space available on my partition
> 
> df ...
> Use: 100% Mounted on /
> 
> Is suppose the above could be a problem...

Uhhhh... yeah.

Using the current authentication techniques, there's a key written into
your ~/.Xauthority when the X server starts up. This allows finer grained
control than just controlling X connections by originating IP (which,
although it can be lots of fun in an office with shared computing
resources, isn't terribly secure...).

If it can't write the file, then all the connections are going to be
refused. "man Xsecurity" for more.

It's not a good idea to run as root or run X as root. I'd strongly suggest
creating a user account and doing everything as that, then "su"ing to root
when you *have* to do something that requires root. Think about security
not just as a way to keep other people from messing up your machine, but
also from making sure that you don't do something stupid by accident.
Something as simple as accidentally providing arguments to "hostname" has
different consequences when run as a user versus root.

On your core files, they're created when an application crashes. You can
see what application it was  "file /usr/lib/rhs/control-panel/core".

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