Re: CSDK Installation - General Question

Colin Dawson wrote: > Recently the developers here copied the csdk directories installed on one > server over to another because I was not in the office and they were too > impatient to wait for me to return the next day. Everything seems to work > fine although the owner:group are not correct because the UID/GID were > already allocated. Now for the question.... If the csdk works without being > owner:group informix what is the point of having an install script and is > there any situation when not being the correct owner:group would cause a > problem? One of the interesting issues with CSDK is that in fact there is nothing in it that depends on the correct ownership - unlike IDS. Indeed, I have often futzed with the (older) installer scripts to remove the test for user informix or user root, and to remove the chown/chgrp operations, so that I can do a 'non-privileged' install. And, for any single user, a non-privileged install is fine. As long as the executables are executable, and the shared libraries have the appropriate permissions, and so on, there are no problems - it will work fine and connect to the server fine. So, you ask, why do we bother with making you install it as root, or informix? Fair question - but there is a reason. Classically, CSDK is installed in the same $INFORMIXDIR as IDS. Now, when that happens, you most definitely do not want just anybody owning the software - you really do want user informix in charge of the stuff. There are multiple reasons for that, the primary one being that you don't want just anybody able to write in directories under a server $INFORMIXDIR. However, if you are using CSDK (or I-Connect) out of a separate directory, one which does not also contain IDS, those constraints are much less important. In general, if the machine is going to be used by many people and the CSDK is going to be used by many people, the software should be owned by one of the 'system users', so that it is not changed unexpectedly or uncontrolledly. But if you are working on a single-user machine (or primarily single-user machine) and only one person will really be using the software - for example, it's installed on a PC, running Windows or Linux, that one developer uses - there is really no need for special permissions. So - your call. What's done will continue to work. It isn't the standard, but it certainly works. There's nothing SUID or SGID in CSDK. You don't have to do anything about it unless you want to. (Yes; I have considered getting this changed. I've not asked for it to be changed yet because I think there are other installer changes that are more important to be made first. I may be wrong; how many times has someone had problems installing CSDK or I-Connect because of the root/informix requirement?)