wine users - Sep 2008 - Windows SNMP Probe via Wine

Hi all,

I have read through just about every relevant post on this site and I also
experimented a bit and I'm looking for your opinion on a solution have come
up with.

I am attempting to connect a Linux web server to a monitoring package.  This
packages (absolutely) requires a Windows based probe on the same network as the
Linux server.  The probe itself uses SNMP, Ping, and Telnet to talk to the
server.  It's a waste to put another Windows box in the location for that
one purpose.

So, I got everything working, got the probe installed, I see that Ping and
Telnet does not work, but hey that's fine because SNMP works great.  And
yes, its running as something other than root.

I have to leave notepad open and I have to have a GUI on the machine, but
that's not bad considering my situation.

My question is, is this a ridiculous solution?  I plan on creating a script to
install Wine and set up this service.  We're talking about 37Megs of disk
space and very little overhead.  Can anyone think of a reason why this is a
really bad idea?

mclovin you need to learn about Linux security. 

Really Root on Linux does not exist as most people think.   Root is basically a
construct nothing more.  Root = Normal User + POSIX capabilities permissions.

If your kernel has posix file capabilities give wine assign CAP_NET_RAW
permission to wine.  There is less security risk this way.

Every segment of the powers that root has can be turned on 1 at a time for a
program if you know how.  Reason why I go threw people for even running wine as
root on a Linux box ever.

Other ways of using posix file capabilities have existed since 2.2 Linux Kernel.

Oh, thanks very much.  I was misunderstanding what you were saying.  Thank you
very much for the clarification.