I have some question. I’m trying to create some bash script to automatically some task. I need to do the first step of the task as normal user, and su – to be root to finish the task. I’ve been wondering if there is a way to do that? Until now i’m only been able to start the bash as normal user, complete the first step, ask for su – password, but after it connect [...]

I have a need to copy files between servers through the web. I’m using RSYNC over ssh to do so. The problem is, I need to be able to transfer files, no matter where the files is. I created a user rsync and : usermod -G root -a rsync to give him the right to read/write anywhere on both servers. During the transfer, I see this error: rsync: mkstemp “/root/.myFile.RDr2HY” failed: Permission denied (13) I [...]

ls -l /etc/passwd gives $ ls -l /etc/passwd -rw-r–r– 1 root root 1862 2011-06-15 21:59 /etc/passwd So an ordinary user can read the file. Isn’t this a security hole ? Actual password hashes are stored in /etc/shadow, which is not readable by regular users. /etc/passwd holds other information about user ids and shells that must be readable by all users for the system to function. Check more discussion of this question. Bookmark on Delicious Digg [...]

I believe I had set everything up correctly when I had built the server (maybe it was a pre-configured LAMP that the VPS host Linode supplied that set things up) It seems that every Apache process runs under the user nobody which is what I had intended in the configuration, however the lower PID (longest running Apache process) is still running under root, an my PHP scripts seem to report the current user as root [...]

We just purchased a D-Link DMC-1000 media converter chassis with a DMC-1002 management module. Connected to the module through a COM port and PuTTy and changed the root password. Subsequent login attempts fail now and trying to reset the password (the manual says to hit the escape sequence 3-4 times during bootup) do not work – there is no response to the action. Anyone have any ideas? I’ve got a support job open with D-Link [...]

I’ve a debian 6 installed on a server. I installed ingres on this server, which runs now with the user “ingres”, I want to connect to ssh with the ingres user(for many reason, one of them is that when I do “su ingres”, it seems that commands stored in .profile file are not executed). The user has a /home/ingres folder, bash as console, but when I try to connect I got an “Access denied” error. [...]