UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,

I am a newbie to linux and hopefully you guys can hlep me.

I installed tomcat and I created a script by ln -s /xyz........ tomcat. When I restart the server it startup but it start up with root. I created a new user and group also called tomcat. I want tomcat to be the owner of tomcat when it startup automatically.

Any ideas of how I can accomplish this task?

Thanks

chown user:group file

for example:

chown tomcat:tomcat file

if tomcat is a directory, you can do a recusive owner change like this:

chown -r user:group file

hope this helps.

tomcat is the owner and the group of all the directory.

chown -R tomcat tomcat
chgrp -R tomcat tomcat
chmod 750 -R tomcat

this is what i've done and root is still the owner after a reboot. root is starting up all the services and how can this be possible??

thanks

Well, it's kind of tricky. Only root can open a port in the range of 1-1024. So the common http port, 80, can only be opened by root. But many server implementations, such as Apache httpd, can have the root process listen on port 80, then hand the incoming data off to a non-priveleged process (Yes this is a very basic explanation of this, but it'll give you just the basics of what's going on).

A quick search on Google will bring up a couple of results, such as this one:
http://www.samag.com/documents/s=115...101d/0101d.htm
Check farther down the page... he even includes a sample startup script that will run the process as a non-root user. Also, many time, the service docs will detail how to begin the server as a non-priveleged use. Check the man pages.

Hope this helps.

great info....

when i installed rh linux 7.2 with the dns server.
it created a named user and group.

when i did a ps aux it shows named running with named as the owner, how is that possible?

named group id is below 100, could that be it?

thanks again

I believe that it starts as root, (in many cases) drops into a chroot'ed environment, then drops it's privs and switches user to "named". So it's actually started as root, binds to the needed port, then drops to "named" permissions.

I may be way off, but I think that's it, generally speaking.

thanks for that link, it helped me a lot.

xNYx