Re. suid/sudo in python

[rustom]

On Mar 30, 9:41 pm, "Martin P. Hellwig" <martin.hell... at dcuktec.org>
wrote:
> Rustom Mody wrote:

>
> The essence of your program is that you only want information, that is
> great! Since that makes it all a bit simpler.
>
> How about writing a cronjob that outputs the require information into a
> file and then write a separate program that reads the output and
> displays it on the web site when requested?

I dont 'only want information.' I want to do everything that root can
do through a web interface

> I don't think this is necessary a python problem but a generic, SUID
> scripts considered dangerous, problem.

Yeah I know and I'm prepared for the consequences -- think of it as
running with the hardware ethernet interfaces down-ed.
Seems to contradict the web thing above so let me explain:

Machine runs vista -> Vista runs VMware -> VMware hosts ubuntu
Ubuntu behaves like a disk rack.
Through the web client running on Vista, I want to view and *Control*
the ubuntu disk rack (somewhat like manipulating the cups printer via
localhost://631)

The context is that we want to teach a course on LVM, RAID, SCSI
actual disks  etc and during that we would like a nice summarised
picture in front of the class rather than arcane playing-around-ing
with fdisk, pvcreate, vgcreate, lvcreate, mdadm etc command lines.

I think I know what I am going to try (Got it from an old python list
posting here
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2000-July/044690.html
which explains how perl does it)
Copy /usr/bin/python to ~/bin/python-su
make it suid
run the scripts under python-su

Any major holes (apart from the security ones :-) ) in my plan??