Porting issues: file owned by root, user nobody

Porting issues: file owned by root, user nobody

[David Arnstein]

My issues concern porting a Linux application to cygwin.  I read 
http://cygwin.com/faq/ but I did not find answers.  If there is another 
resource I should read, please advise.

The application is "dnrd," published on SourceForge  For security 
reasons, dnrd
1.  Insists that its config files be owned by root.
2.  Changes its uid to "nobody," using setuid().

Has the cygwin community settled on uniform methods to deal with these 
programming tasks?

For the file ownership issue, I just have to decide if the appropriate 
owner is SYSTEM, Administrator, or something else.  And what about group 
ownership?

For the uid issue, I might have to create an unprivileged account to 
take the place of "nobody."  Unless a more clever solution has been 
worked out.  Also, setuid() always fails for me.  Are there limitations 
to this function in cygwin?

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Re: Porting issues: file owned by root, user nobody

[Gerrit P. Haase]

David Arnstein wrote:

> My issues concern porting a Linux application to cygwin.  I read 
> http://cygwin.com/faq/ but I did not find answers.  If there is another 
> resource I should read, please advise.
> 
> The application is "dnrd," published on SourceForge  For security 
> reasons, dnrd
> 1.  Insists that its config files be owned by root.
> 2.  Changes its uid to "nobody," using setuid().
 >
> Has the cygwin community settled on uniform methods to deal with these 
> programming tasks?
> 
> For the file ownership issue, I just have to decide if the appropriate 
> owner is SYSTEM, Administrator, or something else.  And what about group 
> ownership?

$ cat /etc/group | grep root
root:S-1-5-32-544:0:

Someone inserted this into my /etc/group file.


> For the uid issue, I might have to create an unprivileged account to 
> take the place of "nobody."  Unless a more clever solution has been 
> worked out.  Also, setuid() always fails for me.  Are there limitations 
> to this function in cygwin?

Yes, this is covered in the User Guide:
http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/ntsec.html#ntsec-setuid



Gerrit
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