[wellylug] Proper way to start program with correct uid from init.d?

[Sam]

What distribution are you using?

Debian has a utility called 'start-stop-daemon' which is used in various
init.d scripts for .. well .. starting and stopping daemons. :)

It has quite a few funky parameters you can pass to it, including:

-c|--chuid username|uid
Change to this username/uid before starting the process. You can
also  specify a group by appending a :, then the group or gid in
the same way as you would for the `chown' command  (user:group).
When  using  this  option  you must realize that the primary and
supplemental groups are set as well, even if the --group  option
is  not  specified.   The --group option is only for groups that
the user isn't normally a member  of  (like  adding  per/process
group membership for generic users like nobody).

I'm not sure if it exists in other distributions, but it might be worth
having a look. :)

Cheers

Sam

On Mon, 2004-05-03 at 00:46, Damon Lynch wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Here is a snippet from within a /etc/init.d file that I've created:
> 
> sudo -u zope -H vncserver :1 -depth 16 -geometry 640x480 2>/dev/null 1>&2 && success || failure
> 
> It 'works' in the sense that the vncserver program starts up -- but many
> of the programs in the vnc session don't work properly.  For instance
> OOo can't save any files.  When I start vncserver when I've logged into
> a shell as user zope, they work just fine.  Thus the problem appears to
> be with me abusing the role of sudo, or at least using it in the wrong
> context.
> 
> All I'm really trying to do is start some programs as a non root user at
> startup time.  How do I do this?  
> 
> Thanks :)
> 
> Damon
>