[NCLUG] Fedora 6 and the RaLink rt2500 wireless card

[Bob Proulx]

Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> David Braley wrote:
> > One thing that is really irritating is if I log into X as
> > a user, in this case the user "david", open a terminal and su in as
> > root or sudo a command, I have strangely limited powers to administer
> > the system. Networking tools/commands like ifup and ifdown are not
> > available. 
> 
> Are you doing 'su root' or 'su - root' ? Try the - in there... stupidly
> the default is to not have /sbin/ and /usr/sbin/ in users path's. This
> means if you su without making it a login shell (so it sets the path as
> it would be for a root login) you don't have any of those commands in
> your path. 

I always have /usr/sbin:/sbin in my PATH as a normal user.  There are
just too many useful commands there to be without.  Then 'su' which
just changes the user is fine.  (And I would guess that Kevin and many
others do too.  :-)

Really I would recommend setting up 'sudo' and using it instead.
Using 'sudo' seems a better way to go as a general recommendation to
newbies.  Example:

  sudo ifup eth0

Several distros have gone with doing this by default and leaving the
root password unset so that sudo is by default the only superuser
access granted.  I think this is a good thing.

Bob