[pulseaudio-discuss] Accessing audio as root

[Markus Rechberger]

On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 11:04 AM, Lennart Poettering
<lennart at poettering.net> wrote:
> On Fri, 27.11.09 17:30, Henning Oschwald (h.oschwald at gmx.de) wrote:
>
>> > previously you have to ask yourself some very serious questions when
>> > you are using a root process to interact with sound anyway? Why should
>> > any root process be doing that? Root is evil and should be avoided
>> > except when absolutely necessary.
>>
>> Well, but nevertheless an X session is required to allow differend user
>> accounts to access the audio subsystem at the same time. This is a
>> drawback for me as I'm used to do a lot of my daily work on a text
>> console outside of a X session, so I need to run X just to share audio
>> access between different user accounts.
>
> This is a bit confused.
>
> PA does indeed *not* allow multiple users simultaneous access to the
> same audio device. This is because we consider the sound card to be
> part of the user seat,

And this is the problem because it works with alsa, simply add every
user you want to give audio access to the audio group and it worked.
Even with OSS this worked. But PA breaks this behaviour.
How about I set up an FM Radio server, there's a daemon process
accessible through a website which runs either as root or as his own
dedicated audio user - there we already have our use case.
There are for sure ways around this (eg. skeeming the processlist for
a pulseaudio process and suid over to it). But it should more act like
all the other audio systems work.
I can even imagine that with OSX it does not cause any issue to log in
from a remote host and play some audio.
A couple of years ago I used to log in on a remote PC and export XMMS
to another PC for playing back audio, I can imagine that this is also
not possible anymore with PA

Please just fix this.

> the same way as the keyboard, the mouse, or the
> screen. If we'd allow multiple users access then they might eavesdrop
> into your voip calls or even record anything you say from the mic. As
> long as a user is active on a seat he should be the only one who has
> access to its devices.
>

I don't think it's innovative to cut the possibilities back we had
before, it should be up to the user what he wants to do and what not.

Markus

> Now, what you are saying about the relation of X and console sessions
> is not true. On current distros it should not make much of a
> difference if you log into X or into the console. Only one instance of
> PA will be started and shared among all your sessions on your seat, be
> them X or the console.
>
> Lennart
>
> --
> Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
> lennart [at] poettering [dot] net
> http://0pointer.net/lennart/           GnuPG 0x1A015CC4
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