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Your comment demonstrates zero understanding of what samba is, or why it might need root. Hint, its tied to authenticating users and accessing their files. Gra
by throwaway2048 12y ago
Your comment demonstrates zero understanding of what samba is, or why it might need root. Hint, its tied to authenticating users and accessing their files.
Granted there could be better privilege separation, and a more modular approach, but just writing it off as "why is it running as root" is like asking why does sshd need to run as root. Its just a profoundly ignorant dismissal.
EDIT: parent substantially edited his comment after this was posted
- drzaiusapelord 12y agoIf you need to be root to access Linux PAM, then linux is more fucked up than I thought. > Its just a profoundly ignorant dismissal. and its this FOSS jerk attitude that guarantees that things won't change. Linux is perfect! It cannot be criticized! sigh
- barrkel 12y agoIt's not just authentication, it's authorization. Files should be accessed with the identity of the remote user in order to present a consistent view of the file system, test and set permissions consistently, and set ownership consistently. It's either that, or build a completely parallel permissions and ownership system maintained in a separate database, with mappings per file, etc. (Samba kind of does build a parallel system, but it's not completely parallel. Technically I think it could be possible to improve, so that Samba forks off subprocesses that switch identity based on the connected user's supplied credentials interacting with PAM etc., but that's not how it's done, and I don't know enough of the details of CIFS authentication to know if there's roadblockers there.)
- praseodym 12y agoSamba's smbd forks subprocesses with the connected user's account, so I think this is done whenever possible.
- tedunangst 12y agoWorth repeating that it's hard to change uid to the connected user if you don't start as root.