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KPPP Asks for the Root Password

By Jeffrey Howard
All rights reserved unless noted otherwise

With some installations, kppp will ask for the root password when used by a non-root user. This is inconvenient. It's not necessarily desirable to give everyone who may use PPP access to the root account on the machine.

Platform

I saw this problem, and the accompanying solution, described on a Redhat mailing list. With other distributions, your mileage may vary.

Partial Solution

Try the following:

1. rm /usr/bin/kppp
2. chmod u+s /usr/sbin/kppp
3. ln -s /usr/sbin/kppp /usr/bin/kppp

The first line removes a symbolic link to the real binary. The second line changes the permissions on kppp so that it will run as root no matter what user runs the program. The last line re-creates the link that you removed in the first step. The net effect is that the binary runs as root, no matter what the UID of the user running the program. This means that you don't have to supply a root password.

Please be aware of what you're doing, though. Many security holes are the result of fooling a program with root permissions into behaving poorly. If kppp can be manipulated with spurious input, arbitrary code might be made executable with root permissions. I have no idea of the degree to which kppp is (or is not) susceptible to being abused in this fashion.