Geoclue provider requires root permissions

[Michael Leibowitz]

On Tue, 2011-04-05 at 04:56 -0700, Leonid Yurchenko wrote:
> On 03/31/2011 06:52 PM, Michael Leibowitz wrote:
> >>
> >> Hi, Bastien. Thanks for your answer.
> >>
> >> As far as I know, both connman and NetworkManager are unable to initiate
> >> a scan. They are passively collecting available access points. That
> >> isn't enough for my case, I need to get freshest APs, and initiate a
> >> wifi scan (that's easily done with wireless_tools, but requires superuser).
> > The connman manager has a method called RequestScan()
> > http://git.kernel.org/?p=network/connman/connman.git;a=blob;f=doc/manager-api.txt;h=332f6cdaf400e6427e490cbeb62511a3bf6a1184;hb=HEAD
> 
> Thank you, I'll look into possibility to move to connman.
> 
> >> Isn't it possible to dbus service to be automatically launched by demand
> >> with root privileges?
> > On the System bus, sure.  On the session bus, it's a bad idea.  You
> > could have a setuid helper or something, but I think what you are trying
> > to do is done by the connection managers, so you might as well use them.
> 
> Is it technically possible to create geoclue provider and place it on a 
> system bus? Will it be recognized by a regular geoclue clients? I tried 
> to place it's service definition to /usr/share/dbus-1/system/services/ 
> and to add permissions file to /etc/dbus-1/system.d/ (allowing user to 
> own, to send and to work with interfaces for my provider) - but still 
> regular geoclue clients are unable to get location from it (and started 
> with sudo as well - so when moved to system-services - it's disappeared 
> for regular geoclue clients).

No.  To do such a thing, you would have to cut the provider in half.
One part would be on the system bus and the provider would be on the
session bus.  The part in the session bus would then connect to the
service on the system bus.  It is possible, but overly complicated and
probably asking for trouble.

> I saw that geoclue has switch to be built to use system bus, but 
> building replacement for default build of geoclue (and unstable one - I 
> saw problems reported with building geoclue on system bus) - isn't seems 
> like a solution.
> 
> Thanks,
> Leonid.

Cheers
-- 
Michael Leibowitz <michael.leibowitz at intel.com>