Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Springer · Joined: 22 Aug 2006 Posts: 52 Location: Austin, TX

I'm looking for a multiuser Puppy derivative for a small embedded server (no gui) application on e-box 2300 hardware.

IIRC, Grafpup has multiuser support, but being graphics-heavy, it's not necessarily the best starting place.

Are there other multiuser Puppy variants? Any good recommendations for embedded Puppy booting off CF card?

Springer · Joined: 22 Aug 2006 Posts: 52 Location: Austin, TX

I should clarify: by multi-user, I mean supporting non-root users with limited privileges.

This is more for security concerns in my application than to actually support multiple simultaneous users, although that might happen.

GuestToo · Puppy Master Joined: 04 May 2005 Posts: 4078

Xampp must start running as root ... it automatically runs the Apache server as user nobody, with limited privileges

so if someone were able to get into your system through the web server, they would have the same privileges as the server, that is the privileges that "nobody" has, which is very limited

in most Linux distros, an unprivileged user can su to root ... in standard Puppy, the suid bit is not set on tinylogin, so "nobody" can not su to root, even if a root password were set and the intruder knew the password

my Monkey web server package works the same way ... it starts as root and then runs the server as user nobody (if you don't start the server as root, the server can not use the lower port numbers, like port 80 and port 21)

Gekko · Posted: Fri 25 May 2007, 06:43 Post_subject:

install the "shadow" package from a tgz. This installs a real su, login and adds useradd, groupadd, etc. I've been using it for sshd. The only thing it can't do is load X through other users.

raffy · Joined: 25 May 2005 Posts: 4734 Location: Manila

Look for onebone (no X) and add your server.

As G2 said, user "nobody" is the one used by servers generally, even if it gets started by root.

There is one issue here, which is that Puppy occasionally reverts ownership of the files in htdocs to root. Is there a way of preventing this?

GuestToo · Puppy Master Joined: 04 May 2005 Posts: 4078

you could try setting the file permissions to read-only

you could set the default ownership and/or permissions of the files from a script, maybe every time the server is started, something like this:

chown -R nobody:nobody /root/htdocs/*
exec lampp start