set user id for service ?

[Havoc Pennington]

Matthew Johnson wrote:
> One worry I have reading this thread is that I have a lot of computers
> where this is the case; most of the time no-one is logged in and no-one
> _ever_ logs in graphically, it's just not installed. Is there anything
> which I currently do on my servers which you are planning to handle with
> session-based programs?
> 

If I understand it properly, the basic plan David proposed I think is 
pretty elegant. As you may know, the session programs search a 
configuration path:

  1. systemwide mandatory settings (set by sysadmin)
  2. per-user settings
  3. systemwide default settings (set by sysadmin)
  4. factory default settings

The proposal is that if nobody is logged in, we want to use *exactly* 
this same search, but minus number 2. What that means is that if you set 
the default or mandatory configuration for all users, that configuration 
is automatically also used when there are no users logged in.

What this also means is that the code for the "session programs" and the 
code for the systemwide / nobody-logged-in daemon *should* be 99% the same.

Right now we have some historical daemons that are systemwide only and 
some historical daemons that are session only, and we need to evolve 
them toward the above goal instead.

Havoc