start misbehaving deamons as another user than root

[Philippe De Swert]

Hi all,

On Thu, 2007-07-12 at 13:05 +0100, Scott James Remnant wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-07-12 at 13:18 +0200, Philippe De Swert wrote:
> 
> > > > I wondered if there was a way to get upstart to start daemons with another
> > > > user than root. This because some daemons don't drop there privileges decently
> > > > (or as in my case I need the init system to start them up, but I need them to
> > > > be running with user privileges)
> > > > 
> > > > I tried the following in the upstart scripts:
> > > > 
> > > > su -l username -c daemon-command
> > > > 
> > > su -l username -c exec daemon-command
> > 
> > I tried this, unfortunately upstart complains about an unknown stanza
> > 
> It has to be in an exec stanza, e.g.
> 
> exec su -l username -c exec daemon-command

The extra exec statement  after -c does nothing. Also I have a perfectly
valid shell for the user (thank Michael for the suggestion anyway).
Still it does work to run the process with a different user. The main
problem is still that it spawns two seperate processes which screws up
the respawning.

In the meantime I have written a small program that forks, changes uid
and gid and execs the actual program with different user privileges,
which seems to work. (I need to iron out the bugs as not all the daemons
I want to start like that seem to work)

However I still wonder if it would make sense to add this functionality
natively to upstart.

Cheers,

Philippe

PS: apologies for breaking the threading earlier. The only way to access
my mail from work is my providers webmail which likes to break
threading.