by Hello All!
I'm dealing with a small office server running redhat where diald
provides a connection to the internet using pppd. Recently I added a
dial in PPP connection, and now when I telnet to the server with my
dialin connection it comes up with the 'Connected To..' message straight
away, (so I presume that my machine connects to the server directly) but
there
is a delay before I get the 'Login' and 'Password' prompts, I'm pretty
sure that it's during this delay that diald brings up the link to the
internet. Presumably the server gets a connection from my client machine
OK, but then can't figure out how to route packets back to it. So I
added to my ip-up script;
'route -host <hostip> dev <ppp-device>'
where <hostip> and <ppp-device> are arguments passed to the script that
tell it the ip address of the client and which net interface it is on (I
detect which tty device as well, so that I only do this for the dial-in
link). I was totally confident that this was the solution to the
problem, supplying an explicit route back to the client, so that packets
wouldn't get sent to the default route of the diald 'fake' slip device,
and cause the internet link to come up. IT MADE NO DIFFERENCE
WHATSOEVER! Help! I'm sure that should have worked and have no idea what
to do now!
On another note, I want to be able to offer certain admin tasks (of
which ppp-on and ppp-off are examples) as options on the embryonic
company intranet through the use of cgi-scripts to kick off the
appropriate commands. However, a lot of these commands seem to require
the user to be root. I don't want to run the webserver as root, because
that seems to much like asking for it, but I can't find any way to
execute these commands otherwise (the setuid permission to make the
effective user root when a script is run doesn't seem to help any). As
a last resort I'm going to try piping the password into the su program
in one of the scripts (what a pity that I can't just pass it on the
command line, let me guess, that would be a security hole wouldn't it?)
but if anyone has a more elegant solution I'd like to hear it!
Thanks a lot
Colum