Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-factory (471 mails)

["David C. Rankin" <drankinatty@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Listmates,

        For at least the past three releases there has been debate over how to 
handle 
passwordless access admins in the kde desktop. In kde43.b1 I still haven't 
found a way get passwordless access to yast, and kde system settings admin 
tasks (in fact in SysSettings there isn't a way to even get to the admin 
tasks), etc.

        The ~/.kde4/share/config/kdesurc is basically empty:

11:17 alchemy:~> cat ~/.kde4/share/config/kdesurc
[Passwords]
Keep=true

        In this configuration, the problem is (rightly so) that the root 
password 
isn't kept for the desktop session resulting in an admin having to repeatedly 
enter the root password for every different app started. (the root pw is 
cached on a per app basis) So you can start yast, enter the password, quit 
yast and then restart yast without a pw for that session, but if you want to 
start konqueror as root, you have to reenter the root pw for kdesu for 
konqueror.

        The only way I have found to make things workable is to use the 
kwriteconfig 
hack that has been disfavored. Basically, the kwriteconfig fix modifies 
kdesurc to set superuser as sudo with:

kwriteconfig --file kdesurc --group super-user-command --key super-user-
command sudo

        which results in kdesurc modified as follows:

13:41 alchemy:~> cat ~/.kde4/share/config/kdesurc
[Passwords]
Keep=true

[super-user-command]
super-user-command=sudo

        The consequence, of course, is that kdesu is disabled/broken by setting 
superuser to sudo (but the apps work without a password!) Attempting to use 
kdesu after the sudo change results in a crash: "kdesu -c konqueror" results 
in a SegFault Signal 11 crash.

        For 11.2 what will be the plan for giving admins passwordless access to 
applications requiring root privileges? Will it be sudo or kdesu? If it is 
kdesu what fix will be made to provide access without a password? Has anyone 
thought through the issue and made a decision?

-- 
David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.
Rankin Law Firm, PLLC
510 Ochiltree Street
Nacogdoches, Texas 75961
Telephone: (936) 715-9333
Facsimile: (936) 715-9339
www.rankinlawfirm.com
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