On Tue, 14 Mar 2006, Stefan G. Weichinger wrote:

Mitch Collinsworth schrieb:

It's BAD for those of us who are trying to offer backups for machines
that aren't centrally managed.
It was discussed a bit on -hackers in
2004 - April and again in July.  Solutions were suggested but never
agreed upon.  One was to add another setuid to perform include
parsing.  Another was to add include parsing to gnutar.

I don't remember that thread:
- What exactly do you mean by "(not) centrally managed"?

Sorry.  What I mean is, in the case where the admin for the backup
system is also the admin for the machines being backed up (or at least
works in the same shop with that admin) it is reasonably easy to work
around this problem by just modifying the directory permissions to
allow the amanda user to read what it needs.  Easier than trying to
solve the problem by modifying amanda.

In the case where the backup admin is offering a service to folks who
admin their own machines, each time this problem is encountered it
takes a bunch of time to walk the user through making the permission
changes.  And of course one of the questions one often hears in this
situation is "I have to fiddle my permissions in order for your backup
software to work?  Are you sure this is the best software for this?"

Modifying amanda to avoid the problem in the first place looks much
more attractive in this situation.

-Mitch