Arch Linux

synthead

Member

Registered: 2006-05-09

Posts: 1,337

Restricted user running an application as root?

I'm setting up some point-of-sale terminals at our retail store, and there's a piece of software we've decided to go with called OpenBravo.  It runs on Java and is totally peachy on Linux, but I haven't figured out how to allow the regular user to access the serial ports, even when in the tty group.  I have the suspicion that OpenBravo is accessing these ports by a real low-level method (although this is just a guess).  Anyway, the serial devices work fine when I'm running the application as root.

I don't mind running it as root even though I prefer not to, but I would absolutely hate to be logged in as root.  So I have a super-restricted user called "pos" that I want to base the system on.  Usually, I'd just add the application to /etc/sudoers (visudo), but OpenBravo is one of those extract-and-run apps.  How would I go about allowing this user to execute OpenBravo as root without giving the user wheel permissions?

lucke

Member

From: Poland

Registered: 2004-11-30

Posts: 4,018

Re: Restricted user running an application as root?

Unless I misunderstand: just input the path of the executable using visudo and make the user use sudo.

You might alternatively try setting setuid (chmod +s).