UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers

Hi Team,

Please help me with the below question.

SunOS 5.10
Shell: -bash

I am trying to find the original user who executed a command on my development server.

In my dev server users login using their personal id and sudo to a common id using 'sudo -u commonid -i'. Once logged in as sudo they execute the commands. I am trying to identify the long running jobs on my server. Since all users are logged in as commonid while executing the commands, I am not able to find the actual user and alert them. Kindly share your thoughts.

Please note that I am not a root user and do not have root access

Regards,
Sam

You are stuck not being root. If you were root you could execute a command to find the process tree - probably ptree. This lets you step backwards from a running process through the processes that created it.

Not being root means you cannot do that. I cannot come up with a workaround. The sudo log won't help much, based on your description.

If you can find the tty that the process is running on it might be as easy as running who and see the user account associated with that tty.

Andrew

Hi,

You could just run something quick and dirty as a regular user, here is a starter for 10!

Code:

for i in `who -u | awk '{ print $1 }' | sort -u`; do echo "Processes for ${i}"; ps -u ${i} | sort -n; done

It will obviously get more info than you want, but by adjusting the sort to something like sort -t " " -k 1,1 -k 2,2 you'll have to check the exact syntax using man sort but this should get you going.

Gull04

FWIW - if some process runs a long-running process, chances are good the code calls setsid() otherwise the user's process would be required to stay there waiting for the process to end, and the person who started the process would have to wait for termination.

setsid() creates a new session, allowing the process to be left running without tying up the process that started it.

This means that ptree is required, or messing with a lot of ps output as mentioned
above. ptree may mean root is required.

On googling, the long running process will have these envrionment variables set:

Code:

SUDO_UID        Set to the user ID of the user who invoked sudo
SUDO_USER       Set to the login of the user who invoked sudo

So if tell us your OS we can tell you, probably, how to look at the environment variables in the long running process, example for Solaris:

Code:

psargs -e [pid of long running process] | grep SUDO

Hi,

Please find my server details.

uname -a

Code:

SunOS xxx-xxx 5.10 Generic_150400-49 sun4v sparc sun4v
Shell: -bash

It seems the command shared is not working here.


Regards,
Sam

Hi Sam,

Might be below can help you a bit.