Installing the RTE without being root?

[2verb]

OK, for a lot of reasons some of which are political I am looking at how to install the Linux 2010 RTE from a non-root account.

Our product software runs on a lot of sites around the world. When we install updates, we send out a tech and he loads the media and starts the installer. On the Linux machine (Red Hat 4.1.2-48) the tech logs in using a technician account which is fairly locked down. There are things the tech can do via sudo, but not a whole lot.

The tech is not going to be given the root password under any circumstances.

The tech defintely cannot install an .rpm file in the usual manner.

An obvious solution would be to open up the sudo functions, but this would require our 1 Linux admin to touch all the machines that are deployed.

Another way would be to build a new image with the RTE installed and simply install that, but we would rather avoid this as time consumming and as it also takes the site offline for the duration of the install.

A somewhat painful way is to write a script that runs the rpm command via su that has the root password embedded in it. As a last step in this script, the root password would be overwritten (the /etc/shadow entry) with an encrypted string.

Or perhaps there is another way which the power of google has not shown me yet?

[AdamKemp]

Upfront caveat: This is not an officially supported solution. Use at your own risk.

There is an environment variable which you can use to specify the path in which to look for the runtime engine. If you set LVRT_PATH to point to a directory which has all the same files as the normal RTE install path (/usr/local/lib/LabVIEW-2011/) then it should work. That means you have to at least set up that environment variable, but this can be done on a per-user basis.

I honestly don't know what all works or does not work with this method, but it is something that may work for your use case.

Obviously if you need to use drivers for hardware then there's nothing you can do. Drivers require root access to install, and there's no way around that.

[Randy_H]

I think the main issue with this method is the post install script that runs and sets some SELinux permissions on some RTE files. As long as those are set, then I think things will be fine. SELinux is becomming a larger issue for LabVIEW because of the evermore restrictive permissions on executables and shared object libraries with respect to executing memory.

If you are not going to do anything with Scene Graph (including 3D Graphs) or analysis functionality, then this method might work.