[Techtalk] Using kppp etc. as a user

David Sumbler david at aeolia.co.uk
Tue Feb 21 10:54:10 EST 2006


Mary <mary-linuxchix at puzzling.org> writes:

> On Mon, Feb 20, 2006, David Sumbler wrote:
>> What I should like to do, eventually, is to be able to get the dialler
>> to connect automatically whenever a connection is needed, e.g. when
>> launching Firefox, and certainly without having to give a password.
>> Can someone give me some idea how to achieve this, please?
>
>  1. Are those programs group executable? For example, plain pppd on my
>     system is:
>
>     # ls -l `which pppd`
>     -rwsr-xr--  1 root dip 257688 2005-05-28 02:16 /usr/sbin/pppd
>           ^ it's group executable
>
>  2. Are you in that group? The command 'id' when run as your normal user
>     will tell you what groups you are in. If you are not in that group,
>     the "usermod" command with the -G flag should put you in it, eg "usermod
>     -G dip mary" would put me in the dip group. (Have a look at "man
>     usermod" first and note that you need to list ALL groups you want to be
>     in after -G, so make sure you run "id" first and get all the groups
>     you're in already to put after -G too).
>
> I expect they will need to have the setuid bit set too because some of
> the hardware they need access to is probably restricted to root
> privileges.

Thanks for your reply.  On my Fedora system, /usr/bin/kppp,
/usr/sbin/kppp and /usr/sbin/pppd all belong to group "root" and are
executable by anybody.  The modem device is /dev/ttySL0 (root:root
with all permissions set for everybody) which is a link to /dev/pts/1
(root:uucp with permissions crw-rw----).  I have now tried adding
myself (as user) to group uucp, and also making pppd setuid, but this
has not changed anything: I still have to give the root password

David

-- 

david at aeolia.co.uk



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