samba as non-root

[Tom Warfield]

Im not sure on how you would do it but last night i read that you could run
samba not as root.  Something i will try later on a different box, here is
the link of where i found some information about it at:
http://us2.samba.org/samba/docs/man/smbd.8.html

Check out the -p option

After reading over that again today it appears to be fairly complicated.
I thought i had seen it somewhere else and if i come up on that link i will
send you a message on where else i had read about that.

Tom


-----Original Message-----
From: samba-admin at samba.org [mailto:samba-admin at samba.org]On Behalf Of
Peter Samuelson
Sent: Thursday, August 24, 2000 10:52 PM
To: Calixto Melean
Cc: samba at samba.org
Subject: Re: samba as non-root



[Calixto Melean <cmelean at yahoo.com>]
> Is there any way to run samba as a non-root user?

I don't believe so.  There are a lot of places within Samba where it
needs root privileges for one reason or another.  Some of these (maybe
all) could be eliminated -- you can run it from inetd to avoid having
to bind to a low port, or you can run encrypted passwords to avoid
having to read the system shadow file -- but there are other places
where it *thinks* it needs root access (i.e. to read/write the
smbpasswd file) where you could convince it otherwise but only by
patching the source.

Like all good daemons, Samba drops privileges at every opportunity, but
I do understand the desire to run as non-root from the get-go....

Peter