Greetings.



I am working with Fedora Core One. Experimenting to see what it can do.
I got the CDs from a book, the Red Hat Linux Bible.

Coming from a windows background, I am a little bit paranoid, so I may be making much ado about nothing at all.

I am installing opensource equivilents for all the Windows programs I use.

I tried to install an html editor and an alternative window manager. Both were packaged as rpms from sourceforge mirrors.

Neither package would allow me to install the source without first creating a specific user and group. I created the user and group. While remaining root, I was able to unpack the rpms. Neither program would compile due to unforseen dependencies. I deleted the users afterwords.

I have successfully installed maybe a dozen other packages which did not require creating specific users.

Is there a reason a developer would package his software this way? Is there a danger in doing this? Can a programmer install a backdoor to my system this way? Do I need to take a chill-pill?

alanbe

Lets put it this way:

To install a backdoor no special user would be required.

As a matter of fact many programs (specially daemons and
system level things) are run as an other user than root to
make exploits LESS likely.


Cheers,
Tink