# Fun with FUP and root.

Jeni Tennison (jft@psychology.nottingham.ac.uk)
Wed, 26 Feb 1997 02:42:34 PST

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    Colin McCormick wrote:
    >It seems at first glance that it'd be easy to include a userid check in
    >the server before the main loop and terminate the startup if the server is
    >being run as root.  Admittedly that's a hard-coded solution to a
    >human-ignorance problem, but can anyone think of a valid reason to run a
    >MOO as root?  If not, perhaps this would be a useful inclusion in the next
    >release.

    If you want to have your MOO listening to a port numbered less than 1000
    (or is it 100?), you have to have it running as root.  You might want to do
    this if you want a WWW connected MOO running on the default HTTP port (80),
    or if you want anyone telnetting to the machine to get straight to the MOO
    (port 23).  While the latter is extremely unlikely if not downright stupid,
    the former could well be useful in some cases.

    If you did want to do that, you could compile the server so that FUP didn't
    allow the execution of files and/or didn't allow the writing of files by
    commenting out various lines, but that would somewhat cripple it.  The
    other thing to point out is that wizards would only have to have an account
    on the machine in order to do what was described if the file/ and bin/
    directories defined were different.

    With WWW servers, the server is started as root (so that it can listen to
    port 80), but then the process is switched to be run by no_one (or other
    defined user with non-root perms).  Could something similar be done for the
    MOO server?

    Jeni

    Jeni Tennison
    Department of Psychology, University of Nottingham
    University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK
    tel: +44 (0) 115 951 5151 x8352
    fax: +44 (0) 115 951 5361
    url: http://www.psychology.nottingham.ac.uk/staff/Jenifer.Tennison/