While it's possible that it's a fluke of a package I installed or the VPS image, it appears that /usr/local
and /usr/local/bin
(both of which are owned by root:staff
) are group-writable by default on Debian Squeeze. Is there a reason that they need to be?
This is, at present, by design, you may review the team's missives on the purpose/importance of this choice in the following thread: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=538392
These directories only need owner
root.staff
if you intend to utilize thestaff
group as the Debian team chose. Also, by default, thestaff
group has no members, you would need to add users manually to delegate this access permission. As the "bug" is marked as "wishlist", the door is open for this configuration to be reverted to the default-defaults, as most other distros use.Avoiding any Holy Wars of the Debian mailing list, I would suggest you can
chown
the directoriesroot.root
and just usesudo
,su
as most everyone else would just do.