== A little sysadmin twitch

Every system administrator has little twitches, behaviors that strike
outside observers as somewhere between odd and superstitious. Sometimes
these are just habits, but sometimes they have interesting stories
behind them.

One of my twitches is that when I use _su_, I always type '_/bin/su_'
(or on some irritating systems, '_/usr/bin/su_'), not plain '_su_'.
(By now it's a reflex.)

This habit originated in a bit of security advice. The story goes that
if you didn't use absolute paths, an intruder who compromised your
account could alter your _$PATH_ so that plain '_su_' ran a trojan
version of _su_ that logged the password somewhere, told you 'bad
password', and then cleaned itself away to make future _su_'s work
normally.

In my current environment this is mostly superstition, because most of
the time I get root access by starting a 'root xterm' (more or less
'_xterm -e /bin/su -fg OrangeRed_'; the red foreground makes such
xterms stand out, avoiding accidents). An attacker who compromised my
account could just zap the fvwm2 menu entry for this instead of
changing my _$PATH_.

Still, it's my little twitch. Life wouldn't be quite the same without
it.