Hi everyone,

I have just installed red hat 9 with the new kernal on my machine today, and when I was going through the setup options I chose server installation. I have installed rh9 before choosing custom packages and the installation worked just fine. I however now find that when I log onto the machine as root I can't browse the internet. For instance I get the following message when I try go to google.com:
"The connection was refused when attempting to contact google.com" (I didn't type in the full www address in the message because that's not allowed on this post)
When I log on as a user I have created however, I can browse the internet quite freely. It's obviously something to do with account permissions but where do I change this. All I can find pertaining to users using gnome is the "users and groups" option where it doesn't look like any particular permissions can be set (yes, I'm a newbie and a bit lost).

Any pointers in the right direction would be great!!

Me

here's a good advice: forget it

simply, it's a HUGE security risk if you browse web as root. if you do it as a normal user and somebody or something cracks in, you may be safe from the very worst, but if you do it as root and somebody gets in, you're in a deep s**t. literally speaking, of course. anyway, it's a common suggestion that no-one should do nothing as root unless it's truly needed - normal users are for that, whatever it is. specially if it concerns using a network such as internet...even tough you'd be a home user with no important things on your machine, it's unwise to browse web as root. therefore, I'd say it's good you can't do it

sorry for saying you must not do it, but it just is so. why would you want to do it, anyway?

thanks, but this is a test machine, with no other links to any other network of importance. Within less than a month I will probably be scrapping this OS and redoing the whole thing. The reason I want to be able to browse the net with root is so that while I am testing my web publishing with red hat I need to be able to check on little things that might need to be done so I don't want to keep logging out every time and su'ing still doesn't allow it. And in any case, where can I set permissions for even common users?

well...shell/terminal is a good tool for root-stuff..anyway. I think in RedHat at least different "can" and "cannot" -things are set by groups, mainly...so that adding the user to a group enables him to do stuff. you may want to find somewhere (google?) the group information of RH's different tasks, altough I've seen it in some manual I think, I'm not sure where..

if you have a graphical tool for setting users and groups, I guess that'll provide you with the info. you may experience with different groups, if you wish..

and I still don't know for sure if the net-thing is because of groups, but that's for start..it might also solve some other things. to make this sure, you can compare a user that can access net to root user, and see their groups..

I have never seen this kind of problem myself, not even in RH..