[ale] make some apps/scripts run as root

[Narahari 'n' Savitha]

Here is what I want to do.

VM = VMWare Server
VM Inside = Ubuntu 10.10 64 bit

I want to install Websphere 7 inside the VM.
Then I want to install the MyEclipse IDE.

Then I want to kick start the WebSphere server from inside the IDE (it does
this anyways).

Once it is all up and runing I plan to distribute the VM to our developers,
so we dont have to worry about configuration of IDE's to  new folks.

If this can be accomplished as a reg user, I am all for it.

I thougt that if I do this as superuser then it might be easy to install
once and every one gets it.
What equivalnce I am looking for is, in Windoze world the LAN admin installs
Word as an admin and the next thing you know all users who
login to that box get Word as an application and thats what I am trying to
accomplish.

-Narahari
On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 6:17 PM, Michael B. Trausch <mike at trausch.us> wrote:

> On Tue, 2011-02-22 at 14:34 -0500, Narahari 'n' Savitha wrote:
> > How do I run a few scripts like my IDE launcher, the Websphere server
> > etc., to run as sudo aka root without prompting me for the password
> > each time ?
>
> As Mike W. pointed out, there is little need to run such things as the
> superuser.
>
> If you need to start a dæmon that needs to listen on a privileged port,
> there are a few ways that you can do this.  You can grant the approriate
> capability to the user account that runs the software (or to the
> software itself, using filesystem capabilities), though this is not a
> universally supported method of operation (why, I'm not sure).
>
> The other means would be to have a small (and I mean *tiny*) program
> that runs setuid root and does ABSOLUTELY nothing other than to acquire
> the listening socket, drop root privileges permanently, and then exec
> the target program.  That might require a patch to the target program so
> that it can take the listening socket file descriptor either on a
> well-known file descriptor or via a command line option that can pass in
> the fd number.
>
> There are more clever means to do these sorts of things, as well.  They
> are, however, left as an exercise to the reader.
>
> > Also how do you start any gui app minimized, I need to run VMWare
> > tools as root and minimized.
>
> That depends on the toolkit that the program in question is built to run
> with.  For GTK+ based software, I am not aware of any such
> functionality.
>
>        --- Mike
>
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