running arlad as a user besides root

[Chris Wing]

Arla drinkers:

I've been playing around with making as many daemons as I can run as
unprivileged users, instead of root. I've made a patch to arla that lets
you specify a user name to switch to on the arlad command line. As far as
I can tell, as long as that user can write to the cache directory,
everything works fine:

linux2.2% ps -f -u arla
UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY          TIME CMD
arla       470     1  0 04:08 ?        00:00:03 /usr/arla/bin/arlad -u arla


Is anyone else interested in this patch, do any of the arla guys have any
comments? (the one necessary hack was making the xfs kernel module grant
fhopen privileges to any uid that opened a xfs device)


Thanks,

Chris Wing
wingc at engin.umich.edu