Before you panic, this is a development box that is pretty severely restricted by a firewall to only be open to internal users and I'm not running commands, beyond looking at files, as root personally. When I say I'm root, I mean it in the sense that I can be root or have my network admins do whatever I want. I'm not restricted by a hosting provider account.

The last line was pretty patronizing. I've actually been working in unix for 7 years, but I've never had root access before the last 2 months, so I haven't yet learned a lot of the admin stuff. I'd love to have a couple weeks of free time to "read up."