RE: Super User Launcher

[Vincent Harvey <vharvey mcs net>]

What is this "runas" you speak of. No runas program on my machine (sudo is su, so runas is ra?). Will it basicly run a program with root priviliges, but not AS the root user. Like, if i use "runas gnorpm", will it use my themes, and my general gnome UI choices?

What I was thinking that a privileged user like myself, or maybe multiple users would wan't to run gmc, like with "gnome-run -s gnorpm" (-s being a switch to make it try to run it with root privilages.). This would popup a dialog box that I could type in the root password in. If it was right, I can get gnorpm with root privileges, and I can install programs.

With this method, I could avoid the terminal (silly, but the terminal might scare new users, and opening a terminal just to launch an app can get annoying), and keep my themes consistent with the rest of the desktop. Also, I was thinking one way around this could just be to link the user's ~./gnome directory into the /root directory, but this would not allow multiple priveleged users.

Finally, the whole thing against setuid'ing the hole thing root is becuase I might wan't to avoid some dumb program screwing up the hole system with those types of privileges. NOTE: this last argument is kinda week.

On Tue, 16 Mar 1999 12:53:08 C Wayne Huling wrote:
> Fox, Kevin M writes:
> > Would it be better to just keep the password in memory, I hate the idea of
> > having root passwords lieing around...
> > 
> 
> What is this preoccupation with the root password?  Make the gui
> setuid root, and then have root read only files which list the users,
> and the programs which these users may actually run as root.  This
> would involve some sort of login as root to setup the intial
> configuration.  Look at the source for sudo or runas...  
> 
> 
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	--------------
	Vincent Harvey
	http://www.mcs.net/~vharvey (don't go here now, still problems)