Can't seem to start daemon as another user

veeruk101 · 05-31-2011, 02:27 PM

I want to start a daemon as another user, but it doesn't seem to work. What I'm trying to do is run svnserve (subversion server) as the apache user.

The following works, but it's run as the root user in this case

Code:

svnserve -d -r /var/www/svn --pid-file /var/run/svnserve.pid

Trying to run as apache user doesn't work

Code:

su apache -c "svnserve -d -r /var/www/svn --pid-file /var/run/svnserve.pid"

And neither does the following, with or without quotation marks

Code:

source /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions && daemon --user=apache "svnserve -d -r /var/www/svn --pid-file /var/run/svnserve.pid"

At first I thought it was that the apache user doesn't have write permissions to /var/run (for svnserve.pid), but that doesn't seem to be the problem because changing it to another directory also doesn't work.

(I'm trying to write my own init.d service script for svnserve, as in http://www.mygeekproject.com/?p=152, because surprisingly svn server doesn't seem to come with its own.)

Any ideas on how I can make this work? Thanks.

gilead · 05-31-2011, 06:52 PM

I run svnserve out of inetd as the svnadmin user on Slackware. I think CentOS uses xinetd but you could adapt this if running that way suits:

Code:

/etc/inetd.conf
svn stream tcp nowait svnadmin /usr/bin/svnserve svnserve -i -r /usr/local/svn