[plug] Netscape and GlibC2.1

[Christian]

Brad Campbell wrote:
> 
> G'day All,
> The problems between GlibC2.1 and Netscape are pretty well known,
> does anybody know where the problem lie? ie, is it a netscape bug
> or GlibC bug?

Nearly ever program on my system is linked against glibc2.1 and they
don't crash (unless they're buggy software in which case it's still
their fault).  Therefore it seems likely that it's the fault of Netscape
(No, shocking as it may sound, Netscape has known to behave in an
unstable manner!)  I run the libc5 version of Netscape and it generally
performs pretty well.  However, I've heard others say that they run the
libc6 build and it runs nicely so YMMV.  BTW, I've said this on the list
at least twice before so it was probably worth checking the archive on
this one. :)

> On another topic, is there a way for a non-root user so do a
> shutdown -h now?

I believe that Red Hat 6.1 (or at least some versions) allow this for
any user who has ever logged on to the console.  This is actually a
security bug and has been reported to Red Hat although they didn't seem
to care very much.  Another way would be to write a little setuid
wrapper program to do this (you could also try making /sbin/shutdown
setuid root and change the group to a special privileged group and
include users into this who you want to allow shutdowns -- I'm not sure
whether this actually works with the way shutdown is implemented but
might be worth a try).

Regards,

Christian.

-- 
Sentimentality -- that's what we call the sentiment we don't share.
						     - Graham Greene