user $PATH problem

[Gene Heskett]

On Wednesday 05 April 2006 13:03, Matthew Saltzman wrote:
>[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.

Snapshot Tarballs, directly from Martins web page at umontreal, the only 
way to fly with amanda.

>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.

Ben running it since the evening of the 23rd of March, with one update 
since.  Nice.

>> 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

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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