[distcc] distcc 0.14 patch for setting uid/gid

Martin Pool mbp at samba.org
Wed Nov 20 22:54:00 GMT 2002


On 20 Nov 2002, Dwayne Rightler <drightler at technicalogic.com> wrote:
> Dunno...  I always prefer a program to change user/drop privs itself...
> probally a personal preference thing.  At work I tried to do a su -c first
> and RedHat gives nodoby a shell of /bin/nologin by default so it didn't
> work.  Could I change nobody's shell?  Sure.  I hacked this in for my own
> use really, just decided to send the patch to the list and see if anyone
> else wanted it.  I would be interested in knowing if the method I used to
> drop privs isn't secure, however.

RedHat, SuSE, and Debian (at least) all have standard functions for
starting a daemon as a particular user.  The user doesn't need to have
a shell.  On RedHat, see /etc/init.d/functions.

Most of them end up doing something like

root at toey ~# su - distcc -c '/bin/echo hello; id' -s /bin/sh
hello
uid=103(distcc) gid=65534(nogroup) groups=65534(nogroup)

-- 
Martin



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