Re: GNOME Usability Improvements - Fix the window manager!

["Michael K. Johnson" <johnsonm redhat com>]

Matthias Warkus writes:
>Maybe we should make substituting a user ("going root") easier,
>provide a graphical (but bullet-proof audited) front-end to it, but

We've got that in Red Hat Linux.  Anyone who wants to is welcome to
use it -- they just need to have PAM, which not everyone does...

What we have is a NON-setuid wrapper that handles the gui, that calls
a setuid wrapper which does the authentication, and then runs the
underlying program.  In 6.0 it isn't used to start graphical programs,
but that's trivial to change, because we have pam_xauth which allows
us to forward xauth cookies to the root process so that it can
display even when xauth is in effect.  pam_xauth isn't a part of the
current pam release, but it will be soon, and in the meantime, I've
announced its availabiliy on pam-list and will give a copy to anyone
who wants it.

michaelkjohnson

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