On Wed, 19 Sep 2007 at 20:41 -0400, Douglas A. Tutty wrote:
quoted text
> Lets take a typical family setup.  Mom is the SA who knows the root 
> password.  Dad can be operator and do stuff with sudo.  However, the 
> kids may just want to listen to CDs, watch DVDs, access their homework 
> on a USB stick, rip a CD to MP3 and transfer it to their player or move 
> MP3s from their player and burn them to a CD.

Actually, I was envisioning that the kids would have operator permissions.  
I was thinking that an "operator" is anyone who has physical access to the 
computer and is expected to use the hardware.

I don't know the history of the operator group, but it almost seems as if 
it dates back to the days when BSD ran on mainframes whose only form of 
removable media was a tape drive.  Of course, computers are being used 
much differently nowadays, so it makes sense to update the operator group.

Or, alternatively, maybe the operator group has become obsolete with the 
advent of sudo?  In that case, perhaps the operator group should be 
abolished, because I get the feeling that the operator group, in its 
current form, isn't serving any real purpose.