gabriel rosenkoetter on Sun, 17 Nov 2002 12:36:17 -0500


[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: [PLUG] Weird APT error message


On Sun, Nov 17, 2002 at 11:56:08AM -0500, Stephen Gran wrote:
> 'permission denied' as root is a bad sign, and can mean
> either a rooted box, or a corrupted filesystem.  I'm kind of banking on
> bad hardware, though.

While I may agree with your diagnosis (though I'd be checking for
file system damage first, hardware second), getting a "permission
denied" message as the root user shouldn't shock you. root can't
write to a read-only file system; root can't just traipse through
kernel memory (or shouldn't be able to, but the IA32 MMU is broken
in such a way that you *can't* protect memory properly and be able
to use a video card for user-level programs... like, say, XF86--
aperature X drives are a lousy hack that doesn't actually protect
you anyway); root can't arbitrarily read or write processor registers;
root can't raise hardware interrupts (even by way of pseudo-devices).

root may be the super-user, but he's still just a user in the
kernel/user OS division.

-- 
gabriel rosenkoetter
gr@eclipsed.net

Attachment: pgpAL8nhH5CHa.pgp
Description: PGP signature