pon and poff as non-root user

**fingers99** · 08-11-2003, 12:42 AM

I like pon and poff rather than kppp.

I used to be able to run pon and poff as root and knoppix.

Now, I want to get rid of knoppix, so I created a new user, duplicated every mention of knoppix (with the name of my new user) in /etc/group and /etc/group.org and find that I can no longer pon or poff as anyone other than root. Ideas welcomed!

**Tech2k** · 08-11-2003, 12:48 AM

Is that a problem?I know this is not the answer your looking for and hope someone tells you how to run as a user but I use nothing but pon to dial my isp and have always done it as root.I just open an xterm and su then pon myisp then I can close that term and it wont kill my connection.Is it a security problem/risk to run pon as root?I am just curious.

**fingers99** · 08-11-2003, 01:12 AM

It's not a security problem, but to my mind it's simply an inefficient way of doing things. I usually have a couple of icons on my desktop (one for pon and one for poff) which I just click. It mirrors my favourite connection tool, kinternet (which is proprietary SuSE and which they've now messed up).

If I wanted an "ordinary" way of doing it I'd use Kppp (may yet have to!) but I've never liked it.

On a philosophical note, why isn't /etc/group behaving as expected? Is there some special Debian magic I'm supposed to do?

And (even more irritating) why do I have to keep doing (as root)

chmod a+rw /dev/dsp /dev/mixer /dev/sequencer /dev/midi

to get sound every time I reboot? It's (almost) enough to drive me back to SuSE.........

**FelixDzerzhinsky** · 08-11-2003, 08:01 AM

I've had a similar problem with pppoe. In the end I've made my users (my girlfreind and I) sudo; made sure that both users were in groups dip and dialout (adduser username dip) and I've configured pppoe so it comes up on boot. Works for me until I find something better.

On a home system it should be ok. I wouldn't want users on a company network with sudo however.

**Stephen** · 08-11-2003, 08:51 AM

Originally Posted by FelixDzerzhinsky

On a home system it should be ok. I wouldn't want users on a company network with sudo however.

You can just restrict the user to certain commands with sudo you do not have to give them sudo for every command with the ALL option just use the path to the command and the NOPASSWD option IIRC don't have it installed so I can't check the man page.

**fingers99** · 08-11-2003, 01:59 PM

Thanks all: I'll give that (those) a try. I'm about ready to re-name /home and mount my other partition as home, so fingers crossed. If that works, I should (more or less) be able to mess up and re-install at will.

My guess (any ideas what?) is that

chmod a+rw /dev/dsp /dev/mixer /dev/sequencer /dev/midi

is being reset by something: after all, a chmod should remain chmoded, shouldn't it?

**RockMumbles** · 08-11-2003, 03:36 PM

chmod a+rw /dev/dsp /dev/mixer /dev/sequencer /dev/midi

I've had some problems with my cdrom and cdrw being setup in the wrong order during bootup, so what I did was put a couple of line of code in /etc/init.d/bootmisc.sh to fix that minor problem, you could do the same by placing your chmod line at the end of /etc/init.d/bootmisc.sh:

#
# bootmisc.sh Miscellaneous things to be done during bootup.
#
# Version: @(#)bootmisc.sh 2.83 02-Oct-2001 miquels@cistron.nl
#
...
chmod a+rw /dev/dsp /dev/mixer /dev/sequencer /dev/midi

HTH

~rock