user $PATH problem

[Matthew Saltzman]

[Replying only to fedora-list.]

On Wed, 5 Apr 2006, Gene Heskett wrote:

> Greetings;
>
> I've been trying to help Anne Wilson setup a working amanda system at
> her place for over a week now, and having all sorts of troubles that
> were triggered by the amanda executables not being in the user amanda's
> environmental path when she actually logs in as amanda, as opposed to
> doing an 'su amanda' from root, which of course gets you the full
> maryann of roots $PATH.  Thats why when she sent me an example of the
> command she was useing, it was always after cd'ing to the amanda src
> tree and doing "./amcheck" or whatever, otherwise she was getting not
> found messages.
>
> This was found by "su - amanda" means here, and its a huge gotcha for
> the unwary.  Seemingly un-necessary paranoia to me, but...
>
> When doing it as amanda, with amanda's full $PATH, /usr/local/sbin,
> where all of amanda's executables live, is NOT in the $PATH.

The answer to the path behavior is supplied elsewhere.  But I feel 
compelled to ask where you are getting your amanda installation from.

There are Amanda RPMs in FC, and I've had no problems with them (modulo 
some SELinux issues).  The binaries in those packages are installed in 
/usr/sbin/.  Amanda configuration is a bit of a challenge, I admit, but 
once it's working, it's great.

There should be Amanda 2.5 Rawhide RPMs some time in the not too distant 
future.


> Adding it to ~/.bash_profile seems to allow it to survive the
> pathmunge'ing being done in /etc/profile, so I'm A) confused as to why
> it does, and B) in any event, is there a good reason to dis-allow
> access to /usr/local/sbin for the normal user?
>
> Explain it to me please.
>
>

-- 
 		Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs