Program requires special privilege e.g. as root or admin

romy_mathew has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Program requires special privilege e.g. as root or admin by Corion (Patriarch) on Aug 18, 2012 at 12:14 UTC
Are you certain that your problem is related at all to MIME::Lite::TT::HTML? I see no mention of the string "requires" within its distribution. Unrelated, I find the error message to be quite clear. Whatever program you are running wants to run as the user account `root` or `Trustuser`. One solution could be to run whatever program as that user instead of the web server user. The better approach would be to first find out why a program would want to be run (only) as `root`. There is very little reason to run a program as `root`, but without knowing what the program wants to do, it's hard to propose alternative approaches.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Program requires special privilege e.g. as root or admin by influx (Beadle) on Aug 18, 2012 at 14:11 UTC
Doesn't sound Perl related at all. Please check out this FreeBSD thread to see if it helps. I only refer you to it because the error message looks exactly the same.	[reply]
Re^2: Program requires special privilege e.g. as root or admin by romy_mathew (Beadle) on Aug 18, 2012 at 15:56 UTC
influx, Thanks for the information, below is the detail of ls -la /var/spool drwxr-xr-x 9 root root 4096 2012-05-16 09:36 . drwxr-xr-x 13 root root 4096 2012-05-16 10:57 .. drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 2012-03-19 19:17 cron drwxr-xr-x 4 cyrus mail 4096 2012-03-20 17:19 cyrus lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 2012-03-19 19:06 mail -> ../mail drwxr-S--- 2 smmta smmsp 20480 2012-08-12 06:25 mqueue drwxrws--- 2 smmsp smmsp 12288 2012-08-12 06:25 mqueue-client drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2011-09-28 11:08 plymouth drwxr-xr-x 28 cyrus mail 4096 2012-03-20 17:19 sieve drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 2012-05-08 16:51 squirrelmail [download] My script were trying to send emails to the users,I belive the squirrelmail is the Email application, I tried what is instructed in the link but still getting the same error below is the configuration of the file after making the changes total 60 drwxrwx--- 9 root smmsp 4096 2012-05-16 09:36 . drwxr-xr-x 13 root root 4096 2012-05-16 10:57 .. drwxr-xr-x 5 root smmsp 4096 2012-03-19 19:17 cron drwxr-xr-x 4 root smmsp 4096 2012-03-20 17:19 cyrus lrwxrwxrwx 1 root smmsp 7 2012-03-19 19:06 mail -> ../mail drwxr-S--- 2 root smmsp 20480 2012-08-18 21:20 mqueue drwxrws--- 2 root smmsp 12288 2012-08-18 21:20 mqueue-client drwxr-xr-x 2 root smmsp 4096 2011-09-28 11:08 plymouth drwxr-xr-x 28 root smmsp 4096 2012-03-20 17:19 sieve drwxrwx--- 3 root smmsp 4096 2012-05-08 16:51 squirrelmail [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^3: Program requires special privilege e.g. as root or admin by roboticus (Chancellor) on Aug 19, 2012 at 02:18 UTC
romy_mathew: What are the permissions on /var/mail? If it's owned by root and doesn't give your account permission to the directory, you won't get to write to it, even if you have write access to the symlink. Example: `$ mkdir foo foo/bar foo/baz foo/bat $ cd foo $ chmod 000 bar $ ls -al total 44 drwxr-xr-x 5 marco marco 4096 2012-08-18 22:07 . drwxr-xr-x 4 marco marco 28672 2012-08-18 22:07 .. d--------- 2 marco marco 4096 2012-08-18 22:07 bar drwxr-xr-x 2 marco marco 4096 2012-08-18 22:07 bat drwxr-xr-x 2 marco marco 4096 2012-08-18 22:07 baz` [download] OK, now we have directories bar and bat, identical except that bar has no permissions for anyone. Let's go into baz and make symlinks to bar and bat: `$ cd baz $ ln -s ../bar bar $ ln -s ../bat bat $ ls -al total 8 drwxr-xr-x 2 marco marco 4096 2012-08-18 22:08 . drwxr-xr-x 5 marco marco 4096 2012-08-18 22:07 .. lrwxrwxrwx 1 marco marco 6 2012-08-18 22:08 bar -> ../bar lrwxrwxrwx 1 marco marco 6 2012-08-18 22:08 bat -> ../bat` [download] As you can see, the permissions on the bar symlink are the same as for the bat symlink. Let's create a file and copy it to bar and bat: $ touch t $ cp t bat $ cp t bar cp: cannot stat `bar/t': Permission denied $ ls bat t $ ls bar ls: cannot open directory bar: Permission denied [download] What happened? You have access to the symlink, but not to the underlying directory. In short, if you're going to write a file to the directory, you'll need write access to the underlying directory. ...roboticus When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Program requires special privilege e.g. as root or admin by flexvault (Monsignor) on Aug 18, 2012 at 14:31 UTC
romy_mathew, I have not used 'MIME::LITE::TT::HTML', but one reason for requiring root access is that for sockets below 1024 only server programs running as root can connect to the socket. Can you change the port used to above 1024? Good Luck! "Well done is better than well said." - Benjamin Franklin	[reply]