Sam gave good advice about not giving the family members root access. Remember with Linux you can ssh to every box to upgrade everything from one terminal or create a batch script to run. SSH is your friend with this and it allows for commands to be passed to each machine. That means with Debian based apt commands you can update every computer with 2 line per computer. ssh -l root computer1 apt-get update ssh -l root computer1 apt-get upgrade ssh -l root computer2 apt-get update ssh -l root computer2 apt-get upgrade I'm sure you could create an easy script for this but be careful with where you store your password. Jeff Rasmussen -----Original Message----- From: Samuel MacDonald [mailto:smac at visi.com] Sent: Thursday, January 08, 2004 1:23 AM To: TCLUG Mailing List Subject: Re: [TCLUG] Distro Advice No you don't want them to have "root" and do patches, it's not like M$ patches. "root" is just to dangerous, I only use it if I must, and then I'm out ASAP. The standard user will never need to use "root" they will kill a machine if it's used without restraint and full knowledge of what they're doing. I've not patched my systems to much. _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list