topic Re: capability to disable/enable printer in Operating System - HP-UX

capability to disable/enable printer

Elena Leontieva — Thu, 23 Sep 2004 09:43:41 GMT

Hi,

I wonder if a regular user

a. has
b. can have
c. should have

a capability to disable/enable printers on a Unix server?

I figured that a user can run an lpstat.

Elena.

Re: capability to disable/enable printer

Charlie Rubeor — Thu, 23 Sep 2004 09:51:39 GMT

Regular users can enable/disable printers. Any print jobs currently being printed will be re-printed when the queue is enabled.

Re: capability to disable/enable printer

Chris Wilshaw — Thu, 23 Sep 2004 09:52:23 GMT

As a default, all users have access to enable/disable printers.

Looking at /usr/bin/enable|disable, we see;

-r-sr-xr-x 1 lp bin 24576 Nov 14 2000 /usr/bin/disable
-r-sr-xr-x 1 lp bin 20480 Nov 14 2000 /usr/bin/enable

Through the use of the setuid bit on the permissions, anyone who runs these commands is effectively seen as the user "lp", which owns the printing subsystem.

You can prevent users from enabling/disabling printers by using

chmod o-x /usr/bin/disable /usr/bin/enable

Then, when the users try to enable/disable the printers; they see

/usr/bin/sh: disable: Execute permission denied.

Re: capability to disable/enable printer

Pete Randall — Thu, 23 Sep 2004 10:03:40 GMT

Elena,

a. yes
b. see a above
c. in my opinion - no

I can't imagine a reason where a normal user would need to disable/enable printers. If they have an issue with the printer, I think they should be working with support and not fiddling around themselves.

Pete

Re: capability to disable/enable printer

Elena Leontieva — Thu, 23 Sep 2004 10:14:22 GMT

Thanks to everybody. I just want to hear your opinion.

Elena.