The "--up" option in OpenVPN is normally used for routing etc. And so it is processed before OpenVPN drops root privileges to run as nobody. However, I am invoking shell scripts that need to run as an unprivileged user.

How do I do that? I have studied Drop Process Privileges, especially polynomial's and tylerl's answers, but I do not understand how to implement. I am working in Centos 6.5, and suid is blocked, both as "chmod u+s" and as "setuid()".

There is an OpenVPN plugin ("openvpn-down-root.so") which enables scripts invoked by the "--down" option to run as root. There could be an equivalent, such as "openvpn-up-user.so", but I have not found it.

Edit0

Per Nikola Kotur's answer, I've installed Ian Meyer's runit-rpm. Although the chpst command works in terminal, in the up script it fails with "command not found". What works is "sudo chpst" plus setting the proper display and language. Please see Why doesn't my terminal output unicode characters properly? Given that, the up script needs these four lines:

LANG="en_US.UTF-8"; export LANG
GDM_LANG="en_US.UTF-8"; export GDM_LANG
DISPLAY=:0; export DISPLAY
sudo chpst -u user -U user /home/user/unprivileged.sh &

Edit1

Per 0xC0000022L's comment, I find that "sudo -u user" works as well as "sudo chpst -u user -U user":

LANG="en_US.UTF-8"; export LANG
GDM_LANG="en_US.UTF-8"; export GDM_LANG
DISPLAY=:0; export DISPLAY
sudo -u user /home/user/unprivileged.sh &

I'll study man sudoers and update if/when I get sudo alone to work.

I use runit's chpst tool for tasks like this. For example, from the up script call your unprivileged script:

chpst -u nobody /path/to/script

Covering only runit and sudo misses a lot. There is actually a whole family of toolsets like runit, and a wide choice of tools for doing exactly this, the very task that they were designed for:

• Daniel J. Bernstein's daemontools, has setuidgid:

  setuidgid user /home/user/unprivileged.sh

  
  


• Adam Sampson's freedt has setuidgid:

  setuidgid user /home/user/unprivileged.sh

  
  


• Bruce Guenter's daemontools-encore has setuidgid:

  setuidgid user /home/user/unprivileged.sh

  
  


• Gerrit Pape's runit has chpst:

  chpst -u user /home/user/unprivileged.sh

  
  


• Wayne Marshall's perp has runuid:

  runuid user /home/user/unprivileged.sh

  
  


• Laurent Bercot's s6 has s6-setuidgid:

  s6-setuidgid user /home/user/unprivileged.sh

  
  


• my nosh has setuidgid:

  setuidgid user /home/user/unprivileged.sh

  
  

They don't mix in the different task of adding privileges, and never fall into an interactive mode.

Your tacked-on problems are little more than your forgetting to have sbin as well as bin in your PATH, by the way.

Further reading

• Jonathan de Boyne Pollard (2014). Don't abuse su for dropping user privileges. Frequently Given Answers.

script which drops privileges and runs other script (but here I just made it to run itself):

#!/bin/sh

id=`id -u`
safeuser="nobody"

if [ $id = "0" ]
then
 # we're root. dangerous!
 sudo -u $safeuser $0
else
 echo "I'm not root"
 id
fi

Example:

root@n3:/tmp/x# id
uid=0(root) gid=0(root) группы=0(root)
root@n3:/tmp/x# ./drop.sh
I'm not root
uid=65534(nobody) gid=65534(nogroup) группы=65534(nogroup)

What about:

sudo -Eu <user> <command>

You complained about environment in a previous comment, so you might also compare the differences between the outputs:

sudo -u <user> printenv
sudo -Eu <user> printenv

On Linux you can use runuser or setpriv if a PAM session is not required (both from util-linux):

runuser -u USER [--] COMMAND [ARGUMENTS...]

setpriv --reuid=1000 --regid=1000 --init-groups COMMAND [ARGUMENTS...] # Like su/runuser/sudo
setpriv --reuid=1000 --regid=1000 --clear-groups COMMAND [ARGUMENTS...] # Like daemontools setuid(8)

From the su man page:

su is mostly designed for unprivileged users, the recommended
solution for privileged users (e.g. scripts executed by root) is to
use non-set-user-ID command runuser(1) that does not require
authentication and provide separate PAM configuration. If the PAM
session is not required at all then the recommend solution is to use
command setpriv(1).