Hi,
I was trying to run lighttpd as non root user in " https://github.com/seL4/sel4webserver" demo and realized it didn't allowed me no matter if I configured /etc/passwd, /etc/group and /etc/shadow and /etc/lighttpd.conf correctly. As I don't have debug tools in this Linux VM to look what's going on I decided to directly modify the lighttpd source code to bypass some native code of the web server and hardcode my own user/group. Looks like it works and I now have lighttpd running with it's own user:
# ps -ef PID USER COMMAND 1 root init (...) 60 root /sbin/syslogd -n 64 root /sbin/klogd -n 108 lighttpd lighttpd -f /etc/lighttpd.conf 110 root /sbin/getty -L tty1 0 vt100 (...)
I also changed the ownership of the /run/site tree to be owned by root.
The changes I did in the source code are basically to bypass "getgrnam()" and "getpwnam()" syscalls as I suspect for some reason (musl libc guilty??) and manually set the setgid value before the chroot. I know this is a very dirty hack... but it works for me.
My question is if anyone thinks this can be useful to others I can create a pull request with the changes. I think that even if this is a demo, it is not nice to run lighttpd as root, even for a static website. Of course the "right"/elegant way of solving this would be not to change lighttpd source code... but I was unable to do that way.
Let me know your opinions.
Cheers,