Arch Linux

walterjwhite

Member

Registered: 2011-05-01

Posts: 207

cannot run privoxy as non-root user

Hi all,

I am having some problems running privoxy as a non-root user.  I am not quite sure where to look as I simply get a return / exit status of 1.  I didn't see what that maps to on privoxy's site.  As an aside, privoxy works fine in my regular install, but in my USB thumbdrive install with AUFS overlay, that is where I am having issues.  It might be a filesystem permission issue, but I don't see anything with journalctl -xn or dmesg or privoxy's logs that tells me anything.

Does anyone have any ideas what else to look for?

Thanks,

Walter

Strike0

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2011-09-05

Posts: 1,489

Re: cannot run privoxy as non-root user

I have no idea what "AUFS" is, but Privoxy by default runs under the "privoxy" user. You can specify the user/group when you start it (man privoxy) manually too, but you sure need priviledges to do so (as for any service really).

walterjwhite

Member

Registered: 2011-05-01

Posts: 207

Re: cannot run privoxy as non-root user

Hi,

Thanks for your reply - AUFS is a filesystem (I am running ArchLinux off of an SD card where the rootfs is squashfs with an AUFS overlay).  I've had issues with it in the past which turned out to really be permission issues.  I had an issue before where CUPS was unable to print because of the permissions, but it fixed itself after an upgrade.

I don't have any error messages to review to make solving the problem any easier.  The only thing I verified was I took the systemd unit file and ran the same command as root and privoxy and it worked under root, but failed under privoxy.

Walter

Strike0

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2011-09-05

Posts: 1,489

Re: cannot run privoxy as non-root user

Hm, ok, still not sure how that filesystem should affect the users. Start it with root and then look at top, you should see it running under "privoxy"

top -u privoxy
 PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S  %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND           
 8423 privoxy   20   0 47572 2992 1280 S   0.0  0.0   0:02.65 privoxy 

That is the default. If you don't, maybe re-install it, and/or share your privoxy.service and how you start it.