topic Re: Starting splunk as non root user in Splunk Enterprise

Starting splunk as non root user

stevenm1 — Wed, 25 Jan 2017 01:28:04 GMT

Hi,
Looks like this question has been asked numerous times but I'm not seeing same issue as what I have. On Suse Linux 11.4 I have installed the forwarder but I cannot get it to start under splunk user using the startup scripts under inittab. I ran the "splunk enable boot-start -user splunk" command as root. It seems to just create an init.d file with no splunk user references so when the server reboots it again starts as root.
What is supposed to change in this file ? I tried adding the -user splunk param to below line but just hangs.

splunk_start() {
echo Starting Splunk...
"/opt/splunkforwarder/bin/splunk" start --no-prompt --answer-yes
RETVAL=$?
}

What am I doing wrong?

Re: Starting splunk as non root user

skalliger — Fri, 27 Jan 2017 16:29:46 GMT

Are you talking about Suse Linux Enterprise Server? I would change the following line

 "/opt/splunkforwarder/bin/splunk" start --no-prompt --answer-yes

into this:

sudo -u splunk -c '/opt/splunkforwarder/bin/splunk start'

IIRC, that's how I used to create my startup scripts in /etc/init.d with SLES11 and SLES12.

Skalli

Re: Starting splunk as non root user

ddrillic — Fri, 27 Jan 2017 19:51:17 GMT

Just please keep in mind that the purpose of splunk enable boot-start -user splunkis to create the automatic server boot start commands for Splunk.