Berkeley CSUA MOTD:Entry 24076
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2025/05/24 [General] UID:1000 Activity:popular
5/24    

2002/3/11-12 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:24076 Activity:kinda low
3/11    I need  to start a daemon as a specified user at startup time, or
        soon after, on FreeBSD.  How can I do this?
        \- you might be able to do it with su, but if it needs to bind to a
           privilaged port and then relinquish priv, then it is more
           involved, say if you want to run named as an unpriv user,
           as we do. so the daemon is in fact in the details, e.g. if
           you are also chrooting etc. --psb
           \_ Actually, it's not so complicated-- ideally, it would simple
              enough to do with a nologin/nopass user and an rc.d script. It
              doesn't need any special privileges.  su wouldn't really
              work, because it requires a shell.  If I try
              sudo -u user daemon
              then sudo complains that I'm already root and don't need to
              sudo.
                \_ Are you insistent on not having a shell for "user."  I
                   don't see why su -u user -c "daemon" wouldn't work for
                   you (assuming you allow user a shell).  Or try:
                   chsh -s "/bin/bash" user; su -u user -c "daemon";
                   chsh -s "/bin/false" user.  And let me know if that works.
        \_ Do you have the source for the daemon? If so, just patch main
           so that it takes two additional args one for the uid/user and
           the other for the gid/group to switch to after starting up.
           If the daemon needs to bind to a port, it might be more complex,
2025/05/24 [General] UID:1000 Activity:popular
5/24    

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2013/10/24-11/21 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:54749 Activity:nil
9/18    -------------------------
        < Less wine, more sudo. >
        -------------------------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
	...
2012/9/20-11/7 [Computer/SW/Unix, Finance/Investment] UID:54482 Activity:nil
9/20    How do I change my shell? chsh says "Cannot change ID to root."
        \_ /usr/bin/chsh does not have the SUID permission set. Without
           being set, it does not successfully change a user's shell.
           Typical newbie sys admin (on soda)
           \_ Actually, it does: -rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 37552 Feb 15  2011 /usr/bin/chsh
	...
2012/9/24-11/7 [Computer/SW/Languages, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:54484 Activity:nil
9/24    How come changing my shell using ldapmodify (chsh doesn't work) doesn't
        work either? ldapsearch and getent show the new shell but I still get
        the old shell on login.
        \_ Scratch that, it magically took my new shell now. WTF?
           \_ probably nscd(8)
	...
2012/4/27-6/4 [Computer/SW/Languages/Misc, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:54372 Activity:nil
4/27    I wrote a little shell script to collect iostat data:
        #!/bin/bash
        DATE=`date +%m%d`
        DATADIR=/var/tmp/user
        OUTPUTFILE=$DATADIR/$DATE.out
        while true
	...
2012/5/8-6/4 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:54383 Activity:nil
5/8     Hello everyone!  This is Josh Hawn, CSUA Tech VP for Spring 2012.
        About 2 weeks ago, someone brought to my attention that our script
        to periodically merge /etc/motd.public into /etc/motd wasn't
        running.  When I looked into it, the cron daemon was running, but
        there hadn't been any root activity in the log since April 7th.  I
        looked into it for a while, but got lost in other things I was
	...
2012/2/9-3/26 [Computer/SW/Security, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:54305 Activity:nil
2/9     Reminder: support for mail services has been deprecated for *several
        years*. Mail forwarding, specifically .forward mail forwarding, is
        officially supported and was never deprecated.
        \_ There is no .forward under ~root.  How do we mail root and how do
           we get responses?
           \_ root@csua.berkeley.edu is and always has been an alias.
	...
2011/9/14-12/28 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:54172 Activity:nil
9/12    We've restored CSUA NFS to something vaguely resembling normal
        functionality -- plus, with some luck, we should now have something
        vaguely resembling normal uptime, too!  Ping root@csua.org if you
        notice any problems.  --jordan
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \_  Oh, and http://irc.CSUA.Berkeley.EDU is online again.
	...
2011/10/26-12/6 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:54202 Activity:nil
10/24  What's an easy way to see if say column 3 of a file matches a list of
       expressions in a file? Basically I want to combine "grep -f <file>"
       to store the patterns and awk's $3 ~ /(AAA|BBB|CCC)/ ... I realize
       I can do this with "egrep -f " and use regexp instead of strings, but
       was wondering if there was some magic way to do this.
       \_ UNIX has no magic. Make a shell script to produce the ask or egrep
	...
2011/6/5-8/27 [Computer/HW/Memory] UID:54127 Activity:nil
6/5     In an effort to stabilize our services, we'll be rebuilding parts of
        the CSUA infrastructure over the course of this summer.  To give us
        some wiggle room, I've temporarily decreased soda's allocated RAM from
        8GB to 2GB.  If you need to run something that requires large amounts
        of memory, please send mail to root@csua.org and we'll try to
        accommodate your request.  --jordan
	...