Rustom Mody wrote: > Ben Finney wrote >> The key thing to realise is that, having relinquished privilege, the >> same process can't get it back again as easily. So if you need to >> do some tasks as a privileged user, do those *very* early and then drop >> the privileges for the rest of the life of the process. >> >> Taking this further, you should isolate exactly what tasks need root >> privilege into a separate process altogether, and make >> that process as well-tested and simple as possible: it should do nothing >> *but* those tasks for which it needs root privilege. > > I dont think this would be easy or convenient (if at all possible) in my > case. > > I am trying to write a tiny web based application that will give an > overall picture of LVM, Volume groups, Raid, SCSI and the underlying > disk partitions. The administrative tools dealing with low level > storage stack (e.g. fdisk, pvcreate, vgcreate, lvcreate, mdadm etc.) > need to be run as root.
i think you should isolate exactly what tasks need root privilege into a separate process altogether, and make that process as well-tested and simple as possible: it should do nothing *but* those tasks for which it needs root privilege. in this case, for example, that would have absolutely nothing to do with interfacing to the web - it would focus only on the particular tasks you need to do with the administrative tools (it would also take care, for example, to allow only "read-like" commands to be executed, by exposing explicit methods for those rather than the unix commands as a whole) (are you sure the information you need is not available via reading /proc?) andrew -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
