How to grant DBSA equivalent rights to OS user on non-root Informix installation?

Question

For a non-root Informix v11.7 installation created by user1, user1 impliclitly is granted DBSA rights.

How to grant user2 the equivalent rights as user1, that are DBSA rights?

user2 shall be able to

• toggle the DB-server between single user- and online-mode (onmode -j/-m)
• run the dbexport and dbimport tools.

Both user accounts (user1 and user2) are OS user accounts.

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Update:

The $INFORMIXDIR-tree is owned by user1:group1 and user2 is member of group1.

If user2 runs onmode/dbexport/dbimport as mentioned above, the following error message is issued (roughly):

onmode -j and onmode -m return:

Must be a DBSA to run this program

dbexport "db@dbs" -c -q -ss and dbimport -c -q -i . "db@dbs" return:

-1809 - Server rejected the connection.

and the log file shows:

00:00:00  Reject connection - 12
00:00:00  Error: Local user validation failed.

Answer 1

As far as I can remember, we concluded that it was not reliable to allow members of the owner's group to be treated as DBSA (or DBSSO or AAO) because, in general, people who can't use a regular root-privileged installation of Informix would also not be able to control who belongs to the group(s) that they belong to. Thus, a private installation of Informix is administered by a single administrator. We looked long and hard at the alternative, but there wasn't a truly reliable way to fix it.

So, I don't think you can have a DBSA group with a private server.

Answer 2

The DBSA group is determined by the group that owns $INFORMIXDIR/etc.

http://www.iiug.org/forums/ids/index.cgi/read/15472

On a non-root installation the DBSA can delegat any other User with DBSA rights through adding that user to that group

ALTER USER bill MODIFY UID 1361, ADD GROUP (dbsa), ADD HOME "/u/user1";

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSGU8G_11.70.0/com.ibm.sqls.doc/ids_sqs_1824.htm