topic Re: osh - The Operator Shell in Operating System - HP-UX

osh - The Operator Shell

A. Daniel King_1 — Wed, 15 May 2002 21:50:38 GMT

Does anyone here know of an alternative to osh - the operator shell? It is similar to sudo, but it allows access as a shell. It seems that this project died some time back, but the concept has some value.

http://www.engarde.com/~mcn/osh.html

I've tried subbing to the mailing list (dead), and I was wondering if anyone here had tried this under HP-UX 11.0. I've got it compiled using gcc 3.0.4, but it seems a bit buggy - even after specifying commands in the allowed-execution table, the commands remain unavailable.

$./osh
A. Daniel King (dking)
Operator Shell version 1.7
myhost.dking (/usr/local/src/osh) #> ls
/bin/sh: /usr/bin/ls: Execute permission denied.

table:
dking
{
ls /usr/bin/ls
exit NULL
}

It would be great if there were a way to allow roaming, shell-type access to our system - without the ability to destroy things. Is there an alternative? A fix? An active user community?

Re: osh - The Operator Shell

Tom Geudens — Thu, 16 May 2002 03:39:48 GMT

Hi,
I had a look at this some time ago ... but I'm afraid the project is dead :-(. The alternative is creating a "chrooted" (jail) environment yourself, but that is VERY timeconsuming (in my opinion). In our environment we use a very strict sudo (specific commands for specific users) ... which is (again in my opinion) the best "low cost / low effort / best results"-solution.

Regards,
Tom

Re: osh - The Operator Shell

Steve Steel — Thu, 16 May 2002 06:09:55 GMT

Hi

Look at

http://hpux.cs.utah.edu/hppd/hpux/Shells/osh-1.7/

Get there by
www.software.hp.com
public domain software
search on osh

Steve steel

Re: osh - The Operator Shell

A. Daniel King_1 — Thu, 16 May 2002 13:45:43 GMT

I've got sudo up and going - it works well.

However, osh would provide the ability to do something like:

>cd /home/dking
>ls

I can get the cd to work, but the ls is dying. I've been looking at the code, and I think the issue has something to do with the way execv() is called.

Perhaps there are some further examples of the access/execute table - specifically for HP-UX?

Or perhaps there exists a shell-type wrapper for sudo?

Re: osh - The Operator Shell

A. Daniel King_1 — Thu, 16 May 2002 14:45:53 GMT

Perhaps I'm looking at this the wrong way. Is there a way to allow read access to the entire system, but not to change anything?