backup of . . . . . http://trevelyn.com/?p=99

-the lighttpd that comes with Ubuntu will not start as the user “root.” In fact, it will fail with the message:

"I will not set uid to 0\n"

This is from 4 if statements in simple C code. All you have to do is re-compile the server after commenting out or removing the if statement lines. Root, or UID0 is needed to do networking tasks and kill processes and such right from your web browser. Let’s edit that code!

The live CD has all of the caches aptitude crap removed for space, so we have to update our database for apt-get repositories:

apt-get update

Let’s remove the old version of lighttpd and all of it’s config files, etc:

/etc/init.d/lighttpd stop && apt-get purge lighttpd && rm -rf /etc/lighttpd

Now, you need two dependencies for building the source code yourself:

apt-get install libbz2-dev libpcre++-dev dpkg-dev zlib1g-dev <-- see below §

Now let’s get the source and put it into a clean directory:

mkdir /devel && cd /devel && apt-get source lighttpd
cd Lighttpd-*
cd src

Change the * to whatever version you end up getting. Now that we are in the src directory, let’s search the source codes for the string “I will not”:

grep 'I will not' *
which yields (at the time of this writing):

server.c: "I will not set uid to 0\n");
server.c: "I will not set gid to 0\n");
spawn-fcgi.c: "I will not set uid to 0\n");
spawn-fcgi.c: "I will not set gid to 0\n");

Now, just edit those two files and comment out the if statements. You can even just simply change them like so:

if (pwd->pw_uid == 0) {
fprintf(stderr, "%s.%d: %s\n",
__FILE__, __LINE__,
"I will set uid to 0, because you are God.\n");
#return -1;
}

cd back into the main source directory and run

./configure && make && make install

Now you should be able to simply run the executable and specify the config file. You may need to copy the config files and init.d files to the right spots, as make install doesn’t really do much. all of these config files that you need are right in the debian folder that is created when you run make in the Lighttpd source directory. Try testing out the new server with the user root:

/usr/sbin/lighttpd -f /devel/Light*/debian/lighttpd.conf

run ps aux and see root is running the new server!