checking, database queries and machine-pinging is done, i set
the UID = EUID for the remaining root-only commands. Cleaned up
the su1s from the commands as now they're unnecessary (and wouldn't
have worked for non-su1-able users, anyway).

I tested this as user tu1 - one of my test users with no
privileges (i set tu1's shell temporarily to tcsh) on paper. its
a good thing because this revealed some  typos in my queries for
the non-privileged-user path. Fixed those.