setuid troubles

I am a newbie when it comes to running as a non-root user. I did so back in my early days with Linux 2001 - 2003, and I recall extreme frustration at times.

Anyway, my script /usr/sbin/root2user that runs at first shutdown, works nicely -- at next boot I get a nice desktop, sound works.

After reading a bit about setuid, I started merrily putting lines into root2user like this:

chmod u+s /usr/sbin/pmount

Ahem, it doesn't work!

I found out that setuid does not work on scripts, as it is considered to be a big security hole. This site explains it, and shows how a wrapper written in C can get around the problem:
http://www.tuxation.com/setuid-on-shell-scripts.html

Ok, I have Wary desktop running nicely as fido, but so many scripts do not work, such as mounting drives, choosing locale, setting up keyboard, mouse, saving session (I am testing running off USB Flash, and snapmergepuppy does not work, unless I open a terminal and run 'su').

It is not just that these scripts need to run applets such as 'mount', 'umount', etc., but they also need to write to systems areas. The latter means that they must run as root.

sudo perhaps? But then, can I integrate sudo such that there is no negative affect when we are running as root? I know nothing about sudo.

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Comments

bashbox method
Username: technosaurus
I haven't worked on it in a while, but bashbox (or something similar) could workaround most of this. ex. wrapper for root su() { $@ } if there is a function, it will be used instead ... so you can put all the root wrappers that you need as functions and only include them if user is root

suid
Username: Dougal
"Barry, I wanted to mention it being a bad idea yesterday... Fedora are actually working on getting rid of all suid apps. For mounting, you could just make the device nodes belong to a "media" group and add users to it... like is done with cdrom drives.

Tags: woof