SUID executable policy?

Michael E Brown Michael_E_Brown at dell.com
Tue Apr 10 04:33:52 UTC 2007


What is the policy/guidelines around having Set UID executables in
Fedora?

I maintain libsmbios. Libsmbios has to read the system DMI/SMBIOS table
to do its job, and this table can currently only be obtained by
mmap()-ing /dev/mem.  I also need to read certain areas of RAM to get
teh Dell system id, which is not in the DMI tables. I would like to make
some of this available to non-root users, but the only way I can think
of do do this involves SUID executables.

Can anybody suggest a better way?

My current problem is in the dellsysidplugin.py yum-plugin. It can only
get the Dell system ID if yum is run by root. This means that some yum
commands, such as 'yum list' will give different output when run as
root/non-root.

--
Michael Brown




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