Antwort: Re: $HOME is not set in init script

[Daniel Meyer]

On Thu, 25 Jan 2007, TKocher at spirit21.de wrote:

> Daniel,
> 
> nagios is started in /etc/init.d/nagios with "su - nagios -c nagios", so the process
> inherits the environment varialbes of the root user, which executes the su command.
> ($HOME is /root)

[root at server ~]# echo $HOME
/root
[root at server ~]# su - nagios
-sh-3.00$ echo $HOME
/var/log/nagios

Nope, the environment get changed to the values valid for the user...

> so the ssh wants to open ~/.ssh/known_hosts which is /root/.ssh/known_hosts which is
> not readable by the nagios user.

sh-3.00$ cd ~/.ssh
sh: cd: /var/log/nagios/.ssh: No such file or directory

Nope, it looks right into the home directory of the nagios user.

> If you look into /etc/init.d/nagios a lot of environment varialbes are set, it is no
> big deal to set in addition the $HOME variable.

Maybe it would help to know which distro you are using - the examples in 
my mail are from CentOS 4.4. But its the nature of su to behave as it does 
here:

"By default, `su' does not change the current directory.  It sets the
environment variables `HOME' and `SHELL' from the password entry for
USER, and if USER is not the super-user, sets `USER' and `LOGNAME' to
USER.  By default, the shell is not a login shell."

(from the su info page)

And my most important point stays: do you really want to have a daemon 
accessing security related files within roots homedir?

Danny
-- 
Q: Gentoo is too hard to install      =        http://www.cyberdelia.de
    and I feel like whining.           =             eagle at cyberdelia.de
A: Please see /dev/null.              =
       (from the gentoo installer FAQ) =                             \o/

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