[Samba] Samba as nonroot

[Matt Skerritt]

Oops, I accidently sent this to Michael's own email, not to the list.  
Here it is again in the right place.

On 14/05/2008, at 9:48 AM, Michael Heydon wrote:
> lordm at stat.ufl.edu wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Im trying to run samba as a non-root user and I was wondering if  
>> this is
>> even possible
> No, it's not.
>
>> and if not what is preventing it from being ran as a normal
>> user??
>>
> You couldn't bind to privileged ports would be the big one. You  
> might be able to modify the source so it runs on different ports  
> (although that would mean windows systems couldn't connect, you  
> might be able to coax another samba machine into it), you would  
> then have issues with permissions (you couldn't suid/sgid to the  
> connecting user).

Also, I think samba needs to be able to fork and execute.

It ought to be possible on Solaris 10 using privileges - I intend to  
test this myself in the next few weeks. (I currently have a DHCP  
server running successfully as a non-root user, binding to privileged  
ports etc etc).

I'll report my findings if anybody is actually curious.

--
Matt Skerritt
matt.skerritt at agrav.net