Dongle only visible from root

English Hardware
#1

Hi,

I have sw product that needs a dongle to work. I have Openususe 13.1 64 bits.
The dongle drivers are here :
http://www.aldec.com/en/support/resources/documentation/articles/1245

I downloaded them, and then I used rpm to install it :
rpm -ivh WkRt-Lin64-6.0.501-1.*x86_64.rpm

My machine wouldn’t let me, I no longer have the error, but it was something to do with permisisons.
So I installed it as root. No errors.
The problem is that now, when I check with :
*./lmutil lmhostid -flexid

it says that there’s no dongle inserted, unless I’m root.
Clearly the drivers have been installed with permissions for root only.
How do I change them to normal user ?
I can see the device being inserted when I type dmesg but that doesn’t give me any
clues. I can also see it when I probe the hardware from YAST but there’s nothing
I can see regarding access permissions.

Any help appreciated. Thanks.

#2

The problem is that now, when I check with :
*./lmutil lmhostid -flexid

it says that there’s no dongle inserted, unless I’m root.
Clearly the drivers have been installed with permissions for root only.
How do I change them to normal user ?
I can see the device being inserted when I type dmesg but that doesn’t give me any
clues. I can also see it when I probe the hardware from YAST but there’s nothing
I can see regarding access permissions.

Any help appreciated. Thanks.

You could make the utility run with SUID/SGID bits set (so that it will execute with root privileges even when run as user) like this

chmod u+s /path/to/lmutil

but bear in mind that there are potential security issues associated with doing this.

#3

On 2014-05-09 11:26, oznelig wrote:

> I downloaded them, and then I used rpm to install it :
> rpm -ivh -WkRt—Lin64—6.0.501-1-.-x86_64.rpm
>
> My machine wouldn’t let me, I no longer have the error, but it was
> something to do with permisisons.
> So I installed it as root. No errors.

Well, you can not install any rpm without being root.

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CODE BLOCK, so that the forum software doesn’t do silly things like
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entered. You get them by clicking on the ‘#’ button in the forum editor.
See photo

And… We also like to see everything, from the command prompt with the
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  • so that we know exactly what your are doing :slight_smile:

> The problem is that now, when I check with :
> -./lmutil lmhostid -flexid
>
> it says that there’s no dongle inserted, unless I’m root.
> Clearly the drivers have been installed with permissions for root only.
> How do I change them to normal user ?
> I can see the device being inserted when I type dmesg but that doesn’t
> give me any
> clues. I can also see it when I probe the hardware from YAST but there’s
> nothing
> I can see regarding access permissions.

Well, you would have to ask the people that made that code. However, it
is not clear where you are getting the permission problem, because I
don’t know what that “lmutil” is. If it is a code to activate the
dongle, it is possibly designed to work as root. Maybe it needs that a
certain device file (in /dev) gets permissions for the user; if it needs
to, and doesn’t, it is usually that the device creation rules are wrong.
You may change those permissions, but the directory is volatile.

You could make that app suid, or call it via sudo.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.

(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” (Minas Tirith))

#4

Thanks for your replies.
First of all, these utilities that work with the dongle are not meant to be run as root
and, in fact, this is discouraged for security reasons as deano_ferrari mentioned.
And, by the way, running as root works fine but I’d like to change that for the
reason given above.
It’s me basically botching up the installation (also because the lack of clear instructions).
I logged in as root and ran the rpm command.
One support person for this software suggested that I ran the installation as :

sudo rpm -ivh <package name>

Would it have been different from typing :

su
rpm -ivh <package name>

more importantly, can I just re-run the installation with sudo now that
it has already been done the other way ?

#5

On 2014-05-09 15:06, oznelig wrote:

> One support person for this software suggested that I ran the
> installation as :
>
> Code:
> --------------------
> sudo rpm -ivh <package name>
> --------------------
>
>
> Would it have been different from typing :
>
> Code:
> --------------------
> su
> rpm -ivh <package name>
> --------------------

Not really.
But I would use “su -” instead.

> more importantly, can I just re-run the installation with sudo now that
> it has already been done the other way ?

It should not make any difference, but humour him. :slight_smile:

One problem might be that the package is customized for a different
distro, like Ubuntu perhaps.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.

(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” (Minas Tirith))

#6

For lack of a better solution, I tried deano_ferrari’s suggestion of setting the SUID bit :

chmod u+s /path/to/lmutil
chmod u+s /path/to/lmgrd

But I ran in the following problem : the lmgrd command starts the licensing server and uses the following parameters :


/path/to/lmgrd -c /path/to/license_file -l /path/to/log_file

I got the following error :
Cannot open /path/to/log_file as log file (-1)
freopen : Bad file descriptor

Any ideas ? I tried different locations for the log file to no avail. I could possibly run it without the log file option but,
I guess, if anything goes wrong , there will be no log to read and understand what’s going on.
By the way, if I run lmgrd as root, the error above doesn’t happen and the log file is produced.

Thanks.

#7

I hope you actually substituted the actual path to the files -the ‘/path/to/’ is just descriptive of course.

whereis lmutil

whereis lmgrd
#8

On 2014-05-11 19:36, deano ferrari wrote:
>
> oznelig;2642456 Wrote:
>> For lack of a better solution, I tried deano_ferrari’s suggestion of
>> setting the SUID bit :
>>>
> Code:
> --------------------
> > > chmod u+s /path/to/lmutil
> > chmod u+s /path/to/lmgrd
> >
> --------------------
>>>
> I hope you actually substituted the actual path to the files -the
> ‘/path/to/’ is just descriptive of course.

Ditto for “/path/to/license_file” and “/path/to/log_file”…

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.

(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” (Minas Tirith))

#9

Ditto for “/path/to/license_file” and “/path/to/log_file”…

Yes, otherwise the very same thing would not work as root :slight_smile:

#10

On 2014-05-12 00:36, oznelig wrote:
>
>> Ditto for “/path/to/license_file” and “/path/to/log_file”…
>
> Yes, otherwise the very same thing would not work as root :slight_smile:

Mmm.

Maybe that program is calling some other program, which is not SUID, so
it runs as plain user and fails. You have to find out which. Or use sudo
instead.

Or find out what exact files or devices it needs accessing as root, and
change the permissions of those.

You can try ltrace/strace, or apparmour profiling.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.

(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” (Minas Tirith))