Re: Apps that need SU

[robert havoc pennington <rhpennin midway uchicago edu>]

On Thu, 28 May 1998, Mark Eaton (HeTTaR) wrote:
> I have found that there are a number of apps that you really need to run as
> su. Logs thinges etc etc. I would be most exellent if apps such as this
> could prompt for passwd or some such and run as su when you need to run
> them.  I have to log in as root to run them because using xdm I can start
> them from a terminal.
> 
> Is there any reason this type of thing shouldn't be implemented ??
> 

The program that does the su can't be linked with Gtk and all the Gnome
libraries, because it's too much of a security risk. What's needed is a
small app that does the su, perhaps su hacked to read a password from a
pipe, and a little GUI wrapper to ask for the password (the GUI is about
10 lines of code). Then the .desktop entry for the su-needing app can have
the equivalent of "su -c appname" as the command line. Alternatively (and
maybe better, but less portable?) this su app could be done with PAM. This
is kind of on the TODO list but no one has done it and a volunteer is
needed. For someone who knows about PAM and security, it is probably a
very quick and easy task. If it helps I will write the GUI, and the author
won't even have to know Gtk or Gnome. Oh, it might be worth seeing how KDE
does this, they might have already written the necessary code.

There is "gsu" in gnome-utils, but it has the abovementioned security
problem.

Havoc Pennington ==== http://pobox.com/~hp