shavano
Even in America -- I long for America
join:2003-06-08
Dallas, TX
|  This is NOT supposed to happen!
Why is it that everything weird that happens on my Mac happens in the vicinity of some weirdness with MS Office?
Sorry for the bad photos -- a screen capture wouldn't work, so I got a poor photo with my digital camera..
This little anomaly occured after a power-on. I had opened a document in MS Word of MS Office2004 Test Drive that gave spinning beachball. Had to force quit Word, but the SBBOD quickly spread to the entire system requiring a forced power-off.
What the pictures show is that although the login window is frontmost, root is actually logged in!!!! The second picture shows I could actually navigate around the system as root without ever entering a password.
The SBBOD in Word was repeatable, though the root issue did not occur on reboot.
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Seek truth, not validation of existing beliefs. |
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Edrick
Premium
join:2004-09-11
Orlando, FL | I thought root was disabled by default in Mac OS X? |
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bobrk
You kids get offa my lawn
Premium
join:2000-02-02
San Jose, CA | That is correct. I think lots of stuff still runs as root, but logging in as root is not enabled by default. If it's enabled, then somebody enabled it.
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bobrk |
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shavano
Even in America -- I long for America
join:2003-06-08
Dallas, TX
| reply to shavano
I have root enabled, but that's completely beside the point....That first picture is how my TiBook booted up. Before I touched the mouse or keyboard.
IT STARTED UP WITH ROOT LOGGED IN.
But it was set to show the login window on startup, and in fact, it is displaying the login window on top of of the root Desktop. Although I could navigate around on the root desktop, the login window remained on top of other windows.
As soon as I restarted again it came up normally with just the login window.
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Seek truth, not validation of existing beliefs. |
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cailyoung
join:2003-06-30
Australia | reply to shavano
Do you have Fruit Menu installed by any chance? |
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shavano
Even in America -- I long for America
join:2003-06-08
Dallas, TX
| Nope, none of the APE-type enhancements. I think the only thing extra was USB Overdrive. The only non-Apple apps that were running were NetNewsWire and Word with possibly Quicken Scheduler as a Login Item. The things that led up to this are:
In the day preceeding this, I had installed the Office2004 Test Drive. I noticed shortly afterwards that some of the webpages I frequent had weird fonts. Turns out they were being displayed in Comic Sans instead of the Georgia specified by Their CSS.
Further investigation via Font Book showed that the Georgia Regular was, in fact, the same as Comic Sans. There were some other oddities as well.
I tried several things, but ultimately installed a fresh Tiger on a separate partition and replaced /Library/Fonts on my working partition with the files from the new install. After first deleting everything that was there. I also deleted everything from ~/Library/Fonts.
Yesterday I tried to open an existing Word document that used several different fonts. This caused the spinning beachball. Force quit Word and the beachball spread further, eventually requiring a forced power-off.
When I restarted, it came up with root logged in and the root desktop showing behind the normal login window. Despite the always-frontmost login window, I could go behind and navigate normallly as root. I pulled up a Terminal window and went into /etc just to prove that I had root access without any kind of authorization whatsoever.
I restarted (actually, I might have just logged out from the Apple menu and then logged in with my normal account) and it came up normally without root logged in. Tried to open the Word document and again got the beachball that spread throughout the system. Forced power off again. But when it restarted this time, all came up normally, i.e. just the login window.
Clearly, there's a hole somewhere for this to have happened at all, but the conditions may not be such that it's feasibly repeatable.
I've since erased and reinstalled. Without the Office Test Drive!
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Seek truth, not validation of existing beliefs. |
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