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Hey guys,

Lately I've been considering my OS X usage habits. I am both the admin and primary--er, only--user of my computer. I'm not sure if this is a good idea. Isn't there malware/spyware maybe out there that might sniff out my keys or something if I'm in admin? At any rate, I started a new "standard" priveleges account that it defaults to when loading instead of the admin one, but now I have to start over! All my widgets, finder folders, smart folders, etc are all back to default. I just don't want to have to deal with that hassle, so I logged out and back into Admin position.

Any advice? Is it okay/safe to just run as Admin all the time in OS X? Yeah, I know I get password prompts for any serious actions, but still...

For some reason I think Ghandi had some insight on this, but for all we know those posts are all nuked.

I ran as admin for 2 years on my laptop and never had an issue. The only malware-type things I've ever seen for OS X all required user action and authorization anyway (even running under an admin account), so I don't think you're going to have any security issues. Especially since admins still don't have root access by default IIRC.

Yeah, anything that needs escalated rights needs your password anyway. I've been running as admin since 2004 on whatever Mac I've had (started with a 400MHz G4 tower and 10.3.5, up to my Mini with 10.5.4).

I do not run as admin. Like Linux/Unix, it's just not a good idea because you can, in fact, screw up your computer. You can access admin rights any time you need to, so why bother?

so Thresher do you have two accounts? that seems to be the only way that's possible, unless you open up the root account and then make your account a non-admin...

Eh? Running as admin in OSX is just like running an "admin" account in Ubuntu -- you don't get root access for anything, as such, unless you enter your password, and that gets you sudo access to do that specific task.

The only difference is that the admin account has the capability of running privileged tasks, while that's impossible for a non-admin account unless you know a priv'd account's user/pass.

bthylafh wrote:

Eh? Running as admin in OSX is just like running an "admin" account in Ubuntu -- you don't get root access for anything, as such, unless you enter your password, and that gets you sudo access to do that specific task.

The only difference is that the admin account has the capability of running privileged tasks, while that's impossible for a non-admin account unless you know a priv'd account's user/pass.

correct. think more of BSD (wink*) not Linux here, running as an admin on OSX is akin to being in the "wheel" group on BSD - not running as a super-user.

Ok cool thanks for the info. Yeah as a compromise I've made it so that the computer will default boot to a vanilla "standard" account. I rarely restart anyways, and if I do I just Log Out and Log back in as my usual account. Reason? No reason I guess. Maybe a small deterrent. Not sure.