Use of superuser(or root user) instead of a dedicated "fredhopper" user in linux for fredhopper installation

Question

I am little bit confused about the use of a dedicated user (fredhopper) as recommended by Fredhopper learning Center for Fredhopper installation on linux.

Can we use superuser or root user to install Fredhopper on Linux box instead of a dedicated user named "fredhopper"?

Will there be any pros and cons of using superuser?

Will there be any issue while fetching the data in Tridion driven application later on?

We are using Tridion 2013 SP1 with SmartTarget 2014 SP1 and fredhopper-7.5-revision-13.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

It is considered bad security practice to install and run processes as the root user on linux. Each service should run under it's own user in order that it can be isolated from other areas of the system and secured appropriately.

See https://askubuntu.com/a/207481 for a more comprehensive answer.

Answer 2

In addition to David's answer, I'd like to state that the whole Fredhopper installation can run isolated in one folder and under any user, as long as that user has execute permissions in that folder and has permission to access and run Java on the server.

Having said that, there are no pros in running Fredhopper as root. All data communication mostly goes over TCP or is contained within the Fredhopper directories, to which a normal user should have access as mentioned above.

Further, the SmartTarget (and Tridion) integration mostly has nothing to do with the user under which Fredhopper is running, so that is also no reason to have to run Fredhopper as root. :)

So, in short: never run Fredhopper (or any other non-OS related application) under root.