Newbie needs help setting up own Linux server for self

[Casper]

Running the crossfire server as root is a litle silly, even for a local LAN server.

Running services as root makes your linux installation as insecure as the least secure service you have running. Whilst you may get away with things like apache and sshd (although in practice you don't even want to do that), since they have been used and tested by millions of users over many years, crossfire is a much less tested product, and is more likely to contain security holes no one knows about.

Secondly running software as a user will limit the potential damage it can do to your system. Running any software in general as root will (with most linux kernels) give the software full write access to the whole system. This means that one badly written program (I'm not saying crossfire is badly written, but talking about software in general) is able to cause complete havoc on the system it is run on, and the problem will later be very hard to track down, and effects to fix.