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From: dsamperi@Citicorp.COM (Dominick Samperi)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards,comp.windows.x
Subject: Sun shared lib GURU question
Message-ID: <1991Jun4.001555.3463@Citicorp.COM>
Date: 4 Jun 91 00:15:55 GMT
Organization: Citicorp
Lines: 25

I think this may be a GURU-level question: xterm is ordinarily
SUID to root, and the X11 shared libs are ordinarily in /usr/lib
(a local directory). In order not to have to maintain separate
copies of the X11 libraries on each workstation, we tried to move
the libraries to /usr/lib/X11 on our server, and to NFS-mount this
directory on each workstation. When this is done xterm can be run
on the server by any user, but it can only be run by a user with
effective uid 0 (root) on client workstations. If a non-root user
tries to run xterm on a workstation, ld.so complains that it can't
find the X11 shared libraries (yes, we have run ldconfig and set
LD_LIBRARY_PATH appropriately). Furthermore, if an ordinary
(non-root) user makes a private copy of xterm (which will no longer
be SUID to root), he/she can run this private copy with no
problem (modulo a complaint about not being able to change the
ownership of /dev/ptyxxx --- to be expected).

The X11 libs were built from the MIT distribution; they are not
the ones shipped from Sun.

Any ideas? (Thanks!)

-- 
Dominick Samperi -- Citicorp
dsamperi@Citicorp.COM
uunet!ccorp!dsamperi