Hi folks, during my experiences with several login tools with gui I remarked a little issue which I offer for discussion.
I remarked, when a login is starting, the user is asked for the root password when the process pppd started. So I checked the situation. On my system /usr/bin/pppd is set to root:dig (is this still so?, my system was installed about 5 years ago and was only regularly upgraded). Normal users are in group "dig" (and "dialout") by default. For normal users using the root password is no good idea, so I searched for a solution. The best and easiest tools for unexperienced tools are "umtsmon" (which is my favourite, but needs older libs) and "sakis3g" (which is state of the art). Packages are for both available, as I made one for the second one. The other solutions are crippled (IMHO) for unexprienced users. All the wvdial.conf and editing files and so on, are crap for unexprienced users. The solution are these: For umtsmon and sakis3g set the excecutables below /usr/bin/ to root:dig. This works very well without any problems and I see no security problem with it. When thinking about ownership settings, IMO the settings of /usr/bin/pppd are not set correctly - please entlighten me: I think, the group of pppd should not be "dig", but "dialout". Dialout, as its name says, is that, what it does: it is diealling out and that is exactly what pppd does - it dials out. Maybe this should be thought over, to make things easier. Personal statement: It is a pity, that "umtsmon" depends on old qt4-libs, which is tricky to install on debian. Still I found none, who were able to compile a package for actual libs. I am still working on it, but it is hard for me, as I am only very very little experienced with this stuff. For sakis3g things were easier for me: I created a package and uploaded it to mentors.debian.org. The documentation is being optimized, and I added the hint related to the root:dig-settings. At the moment I am stuck with the package, that shall automatically set the correct rights at installation. Postinst settings do not work, but I hope to be able to solve this problem too. Help is welcome. That is the situation. As it is already all working fine here, I think we should find an easy solution for all the other happy but unexperienced debian users. What do you think? Best regards Hans-J. Ullrich
