Re: [system-tools] system-tools-backends 2.17

[Carlos Garnacho <carlosg gnome org>]

Hi!

On Wed, 2006-11-08 at 17:38 -0500, Joe Marcus Clarke wrote:
> I'm having a pretty difficult time getting the latest
> system-tools-backends to like FreeBSD.  I was hoping I could get a few
> questions answered.
> 
> 1. s-t-b tries to find its D-BUS service using the system bus.  However,
> the system bus has no concept of service directories, so this causes
> Nautilus to fail to launch since the org.freedesktop.SystemToolsBackends
> service cannot be found.  If I add the following to D-BUS's system.conf,
> I can get over this hurdle:

Ideally, the backends have to be run as root (they need it to change
system configuration) by a script in /etc/dbus-1/event.d, the service
file is mostly a fallback to make tools at least show something instead
of failing miserably :)

Sadly, due to the diversity of init script types out there, I'm not
including any at the moment, so packages should provide their own.

> 
> <standard_session_servicedirs />
> 
> Why should I need that?  Shouldn't s-t-b be using the session bus like
> other applications (e.g. gnome-vfs-daemon, gnome-power-manager, etc.)?
> Note: I am using dbus-0.95.

s-t-b changes affect the whole system, besides that, they very probably
need to run as a different user than the session bus, and IIRC that's
something that's not allowed to happen, and besides that, privileges
scalation would be a complete hack...

Instead, the backends are supposed to be running already as root, using
DBus policies to block access from untrusted users, only root user and
users in stb-admin group are allowed to access backends (the admin group
may be modified using --with-stb-group=foo during configure)

In a close future s-t-b will be using PolicyKit, it will allow much more
fine grained permissions than DBus policies.

> 
> 2. s-t-b fails to run as a daemon
> (i.e. /usr/local/share/system-tools-backends-2.0/scripts/SystemToolsBackends.pl exits with a status of 0).  This is caused by the daemon not being able to write its PID file to /var/run.  This is understandable as the script is being run by my user, and only root can write to this directory.  My question is, who should be running this script?  Should I be hacking it to write its PID to a directory that is writable by the stb-admin group?

as explained above, "stb-admin" is used to determine which users can
access the backends, the backends should run as root however...

Backends failing because they can't write to the pidfile shouldn't be
happening, though...

> 
> Note: I can also get around this problem by adding --no-daemon to the
> D-BUS service config.
> 
> 3. Finally, why does Nautilus try to initialize liboobs when trying to
> get SMB share information?  Where in the code path does that occur?

That's the nautilus extension in shares-admin to show an emblem on
shared folders, it's in g-s-t/src/shares/nautilus

I'm sorry for the confusions, perhaps it all should be documented
somewhere...

       Regards

> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Joe
> 
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