how to get fbackup command to work with a normal user

[Becke]

Hi Guys,

Just need a help here, how do i get fbackup command to work for a normal user, under root userid fbackup works perfectly and backups up everything including all the acls permissions as well.

But unfortunately it doesn't work if you log in as a normal user. I need to get this sorted so i can write a script and get my operations staff to run that script under their userid and backup application data.

Please advise on how to get fbackup command working without using root userid.

Thanks all

Cheers,
Raf

[Henk Geurts · Accepted solution]

hi Raf.

you can install (and configure) Sudo.
this allows users to execute commands as another user , incl root.

regards.

[Becke]

Hi there,

Thanks for your response, unfortunately we don't have any disk space left, as this is an old legacy machine and we are reluctant to add more disks into it.

is there any other way of backing it up, so it backs up all the acls and everything like root user does.

thanks,
Raf

[Henk Geurts]

not to my knowledge....

[Marlou Everson]

From the man page for fbackup(1M): "fbackup does not require special privileges. However, if the user does not have access to a given file, the file is not backed up."

If you don't want to install sudo, perhaps you could use restricted SAM.

Marlou

[Patrick Wallek]

SUDO takes up very little disk space. Unless you are very short of disk space, you should have enough room to install sudo.

On one of my 11.11 machine ALL components of sudo take up less than 1 MB.

As said by the previous poster, restricted sam may be an option for you as well.

A insecure option might be to write a script that invokes fbackup, make the script SUID root and group executable. The make sure the group is something your operations staff are part of. When they run the script it should then run as root.

I don't particularly like that option as any SUID scripts are security hazards.

[Becke]

Thanks a lot guys, I have got some useful info from you as my expertise is in AIX, I will work through you instructions and will be sorting it out.

Thanks to all for your help.

Regards,
Raf