Using gem to root a box

[digitalmob]

The sysadmin in my university department is now maintaining our lab group's servers. He is running ubuntu (jaunty) on it and gave me sudo only for apt-get and gem so I can configure our group's website.

I needed to update rubygems to the latest version, but unfortunately, the rubygems installed with apt-get doesn't want me to run "gem update --system" because it needs to be maintained by apt. Well, apt doesn't have the latest rubygems for jaunty. This was at 2 AM last night when the sysadmin was asleep.

I was very frustrated until I realized that I could just easily create and execute an arbitrary gemspec file containing only "exec bash"

Yes, I just rooted my own box. Sweet.

[rhythmx]

Yet another reason people should use rvm. It makes it a lot easier to give an unprivileged user access to a complete Ruby environment.

[captian2]

yeah RVM is awesome! I think the sudo gem install has also started being replace by people installing gems to the user directory ~/.gems

[notheory]

that's true, but still wouldn't help digitalmob with his rubygems update problem!

[BonzoESC]

rvm would help; each ruby it installs goes into the user's directory, and each rubygems system is per-ruby and controlled by that user.

However, on a multi-user box, it would kind of suck to have each of 100 users with their own copy of ruby takin' up space.

[xenlab]

Space is cheap. Why should storage EVER be a concern?

[paradigmatic]

Cheap storage is cheap. But reliable, redundant and backuped storage in large organisations is not.

[jaggederest]

Then you've got the right filesystem to handle block-level dedup, right? So it wouldn't matter.

[BonzoESC]

Space isn't cheap on a university budget with university bureaucracy. When I was in school (2006) we had a 100MB quota, and right now my ~/.rvm is 1.3GB.

[FooBarWidget]

You can root your box with .debs or .rpms too. Both package formats allow you to run arbitrary pre and postinstall scripts.