[Xymon] Installing xymon/apache as a non-root user

[Mark Felder]

On Thu, Feb 5, 2015, at 12:12, LOZOVSKY, DANIEL L wrote:
> My company changed their policy to not give out root user access on their
> virtual environments.  I need to install both apache, xymon and all
> related packages on the virtual environment running RedHat.  The question
> is has anyone successfully installed xymon and apache as a non-root user
> that can share instructions of how to do that.  I usually installed xymon
> and apache with root either manually compiling or using rpm but never as
> non-root.
> 
> Any help will be greatly appreciated.
>

FreeBSD runs it as non-root out of the box, so it's possible. I believe
the manual install script asks you which UID/GID you want it to run
under so you can start there.

Fake edit: actually, you made me verify this and I realized that there
was an issue with the rc script for the xymon-client and it was not
completely running as non-root. I am now correcting this, but it does
not need root to operate.

However, if you don't run the client as root on FreeBSD and you have set
security.bsd.see_other_uids=1 the Xymon client won't be able to see any
processes except the ones owned by the xymon user. This behavior is not
new or changing; the "ps" command was previously always run as the
"xymon" user. It's just useful for any FreeBSD users reading this post
to be aware of.