Chromium as root

Question

I need to run chromium as root. After the latest update (42.0.2311.90) I cannot do it.
The error is this:
[0420/105918:FATAL:setuid_sandbox_client.cc(126)] Check failed: IsFileSystemAccessDenied().
[1:1:0420/135918:ERROR:nacl_fork_delegate_linux.cc(314)] Bad NaCl helper startup ack (0 bytes)
[1:1:0420/135918:FATAL:setuid_sandbox_client.cc(126)] Check failed: IsFileSystemAccessDenied().
I have tried putting the
user-data-dir
or the
--user-data-dir
or the
user-data-dir=/root/.config/chromium/Default
or the
--user-data-dir=/root/.config/chromium/Default
in the
/root/.config/chromium/chromium-flags.conf
and none of these work. I always get the same error response that I linked.
Another thing that is weird, is that when I run it from command line and keep it running, and doing a
ps aux | grep -i chrom
I get this:
root 3291 2.6 0.2 433860 35096 pts/1 Sl+ 14:05 0:00 /usr/lib/chromium/chromium user-data-dir=/home/user/.config/chromium
root 3293 0.0 0.0 0 0 pts/1 Z+ 14:05 0:00 [chrome-sandbox] <defunct>
root 3302 0.0 0.0 10944 2252 pts/0 S+ 14:05 0:00 grep -i chrom
I don't understand why i get the user-data-dir to be pointing at /home/user/ when I run it as root...
Last edited by stukov (2015-04-20 11:02:39)

Answer 1

I don't know the inner workings of Chrome/chromium, but if it really does what it appears to be doing, it will always fail if run as root.
I was affraid of that but I was thinking there would exist some simple bypass to that, that would be as simple as "chromium --user-data-dir".
The fact that it is very unusual does not justify the way Alad responded. Your response is indeed polite, his was quarrelsome, and this is why I am going to explain this to you.
I run everything at my desktop as root, as I am a network engineer, a network driver developer and tester for Linux and BSD.
I need to use raw sockets all the time and I also need to use internally developed chrome plugins that need to be run with elevated privileges through chrome. Yes, I can use sudo and yes I know what linux can offer regarding privilege elevation. However, errors regarding privileges at my programs may not have a direct visible error message and that might lead to huge work-hours loss.
This is the reason that I want to run as root, I have been doing this for the last 10+ years, I know that this represents a security vulnerability and I have accepted the risk. I don't need any more lectures about it, I have discussed about this alot and I am not interested in other people opinions about that, although I respect them. I don't propagandize why I believe it's an unecessary overhead for developers, network engineers and/or other professions to run their applications as non root. I expect the same behavior about other people that I ask for their help. It is really simple to just *NOT* reply to a forum post instead of saying something like "don't do that (implying 'don't do that because I don't and no-one else does')" and providing **ZERO** contribution to what the OP (me) is actually asking.
I would really appreciate to get an answer from someone that indeed cares to help me solve my problem.
Last edited by stukov (2015-04-20 12:42:17)