Samsung printer drivers open up the system [LWN.net]

Samsung printer drivers open up the system

Posted Jul 18, 2007 15:34 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
Parent article: Samsung printer drivers open up the system

This is the sort of thing I had to deal with when I was a admin assistant for a few hundred OS X machines a few years ago.

Every time you'd install some sort of big-name application you'd have to go and run a permissions repair on OS X because of the widespread changes those apps would do on a system.

Don't ask me why, or what exactly. A permissions repair was just one of those little Apple voodoo things that you had to do periodicly to keep the machines from crashing or doing bad things.

(Plus HFS+ sucks badly, but that's a entirely different story.)

This, and my Windows experiance, shows that this sort of behavior and attitude is normal for consumer-grade closed source software. Sure for 'Enterprise' applications those companies know that customers are generally savy enough to complain when they behave badly with the system, but for consumer-grade stuff I think it's normal just to not give a F***.

If changing permissions around to setuid root would be handy way to avoid a certain class of support issues, I am sure they would happily do it.

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Samsung printer drivers open up the system

Posted Jul 18, 2007 16:31 UTC (Wed) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]

Yikes! How do you know that the installer didn't alter the function of the 'permission repair' utility so that its amended permissions weren't applied? :)

Samsung printer drivers open up the system

Posted Jul 19, 2007 12:02 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Because if it did that then the permission repair app wouldn't spit warnings at me saying that it had to change a bunch of permissions. :-)

If anybody reading this has OS X and like to try out permission repair tool, be sure to never use the tool on the installation cdrom.

The corrent way to go about repairing FS problems with OS X is to boot up using the OS X disk and running disk check and repair stuff from that. Then once that is done boot up and then run the permission repair from the utility folder. The reason for this is that Apple likes to change file permissions around for different updates so the permissions that the install cdrom thinks the FS should have is almost always wrong in one way or another. :-)

I got used to doing that.

Apparently people don't understand that they have to run 'shutdown' on the computer FIRST, then hit the power strip. If they go for the power strip first then the shutdown stuff didn't work. Some people seemed to have difficulty grasping that concept.