On Fri, 16 Mar 2001, lowkey wrote:
> Hello,
> I recently upgrade my system to thelatest Debian Woody packages and there is a small bug(?) that may affect ethereal users.
> Normally I install Ethereal with the SUID set so that I can use it as any user. Now its on my laptop, and I'm the only user so I'm not worried about the SUID openning any security holes but the new version of GTK will not run programs that are SUID or SGID. For more information, visit:
>
> http://www.gtk.org/setuid.html
>
> Is there any way to make ethereal work as any user without setting the SUID bit on it? Without it, it will not allow me to select an interface to scan on. And I would really prefer not to log in as root or open a terminal, su, then call ethereal.
In the past we have discussed creating a small setuid program or
daemon that [t]ethereal could use to perform packet captures and other
priveleged tasks. As far as I know, no one is actively working on this
at the present time.
In the mean time, you might want to take a look at 'sudo'. Sudo allows
you to run arbitrary as root (or any other user). Putting something like
lowkey = NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/ethereal
in your sudoers file would let you run Ethereal as root without having
to type in a password.
I'm copying this to ethereal-dev in case anyone has anything to add.
>
> Thanks,
> lowkey
>
>
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