How the heck can it work?

[James Sutherland]

On Mon, 24 Jul 2000, Ron Alexander wrote:

> I just discovered part of the problem. What I have been trying to do all day
> now is to RESTRICT swat so only the root user could modify the smb.conf
> file. The mistake I made was to start inetd as root. This somehow gave swat
> different rights (I suspect real UID vs EUID).

Sounds like your inetd is very different from Unix, then. Under Unix,
IIRC:

inetd runs as root

When a connection arrives, inetd will fork a new process, which sets UID
to that specified for this port in inetd.conf, then execs the appropriate
file.

This file is then run as the specified user from inetd.conf. Setting it to
be SUID will give it an EUID of the file owner, keeping a UID as specified
in inetd.conf.

> To answer your question, if I SUID the swat pgm, I see the start and stop
> buttons on the status page.
> 
> Here is the problem. I do NOT get a login screen for swat since I have to
> run it in -a mode. The reason I have to do that, is that the encrypted
> password is NOT returned in the pwnam structure. This is an extension to
> POSIX and we have decided not to implement it since many of our *nix cousins
> are starting to toe the POSIX line.
> 
> My understanding is that I lose the password maintenance screen of swat if I
> use -a mode. I can live with that for now.
> 
> I assume therefore that I must be running as root group root and the 640
> perms on the smb.conf file are controlling the behavior.
> 
> At this point, I can either give everyone the ability to look at the main
> page and view the config, or only allow the root user full access and
> everyone else no access.

OK, long term solution: patch swat to handle password properly on VOS. How
are they stored - shadow-file or similar?? Or is there an API call to
retrieve it for a given user?


James.