multiuser setup

[pacman@cqc.com]

******    message to minivend-users from pacman@cqc.com     ******

I am the administrator for an ISP looking for an online store to set up for
several customers. Minivend's promise of running multiple stores from a
single daemon sounded like a dream come true, but I'm having trouble finding
a way to make it happen.

This bit of the documentation looks particularly bad:

       The program files can be owned by anyone, but any databases, ASCII
       database source files, error logs, and the directory that holds
       them must be writable by the proper user ID, that is the one that
       is executing the minivend program. The best way to operate in
       multi-user, multi-catalog setups is to create a special minivend
       user, then put that user in the group that each catalog user is
       in. If you can define a group for each individual user, that
       provides the best security. Then all associated files can be in
       660 or 770 mode, and you should have no problems with permissions,
       and no problems with security.

We already use gids for actual *group*ing of customers (imagine that, groups
being used as they were intended) so an approach based on the
one-user-per-group hack isn't going to work.

What I have done so far is make a mvend user and install the simple catalog
under it. Then I ran a makecat as another user, which seems to work as long
as I say no to "add this to minivend.cfg?", and add the minivend.cfg line
manually. But the restart script bombs, since it doesn't have write access to
some of the other user's files.

Would it really be harmful to run the minivend daemon as root?

Are there any other clever tricks besides the group hack to let minivend work
in a multiuser environment?

Can I get a list of exactly which files the daemon needs access to, and just
chown them to it, and leave them in the user directories?

Or is it just easier to run a separate daemon for each user?
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