Re: State of debianutils

[Francois Gouget <fgouget@free.fr>]

On Wed, 30 Jan 2002, Joey Hess wrote:

> christophe barbé wrote:
> > I use a script written by Francois Gouget called 'sux' which does as
> > 'su' but for free take care of the X authentification stuff.
>
> So do I, but I call mine ~joey/.xinitrc
>
> # This makes X work when I su to root.
> if [ -z "$XAUTHORITY" ]; then
>         XAUTHORITY=$HOME/.Xauthority
>         export XAUTHORITY
> fi

   The above works if you only ever su to root. But I suffer from split
personality and regularly su between non-root accounts :-)
   In such a case the above definitely does not cut it.
   Hmm, just read the rest of the thread and it seems this was pointed
out by someone else.

   Now I think sux is really nice but what bothers me is that it does
not do ssh-agent forwarding. With ssh-agent plus the forwarding I can
log in from my desktop to my laptop without typing a password and things
really work great. But if I su between my two accounts on my desktop I
have to type my password and my ssh-agent is gone. In a way things don't
work as well locally as they do remotely!
   But I refuse to use slogin as a su replacement, it strikes me as the
wrong solution (encrypting local communications, you've got to be
kidding). So if someone can point me to a good solution to this
problem... (an ssh-pam module?)

And if anyone is looking for sux:
   http://fgouget.free.fr/sux/sux-readme.shtml


--
Francois Gouget         fgouget@free.fr        http://fgouget.free.fr/
  Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment
                               -- Barry LePatner