Re: pam_xauth

[Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org>]

On 31 Aug 2001, Pavel Tcholakov wrote:

> Hi All,
> 
> Red Hat's su has always had the ability to preserve the user-doing-su's
> DISPLAY and Xauthority configuration data so that the user-su'ed-to has
> access to the X display of the original user (if any). In /etc/pam.d/su
> the line that does it is as follows:
> 
> session    optional	/lib/security/pam_xauth.so
> 
> My Debian sid though doesn't have a pam_xauth module and a apt-cache
> search for pam+xauth gives nothing at all. Ideas? It's really nice and
> saves time to "export DISPLAY=...; export XAUTHORITY=..." every time I
> su to some other user and need X.

Francois Gouget wrote a script called "sux" that solves this issue without
PAM bloat. With this solution, instead of calling "su", you call
"sux". sux aims to be su command-line compatible, and works just great ;-)

AFAIK, there's no package for it, but you can download it from his
website. I don't recall what that site was, but he's been discussing that
here a few weeks or months ago in a thread called "X authentication and
su" or something likewise. If you search the archives of debian-devel,
you'll surely find it.

Of course, nobody says you can't use pam_xauth ;-)

<snip>

-- 
wouter dot verhelst at advalvas dot be

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  -- from the movie "Antitrust"