Re: itp: static bins / resolving static debian issues
Hi Michael,
Yup you're right about gzip and tar, I keep forgetting just how much
sash actually has in there. Having 'ar' in sash would be nice as well.
As for su and sulogin, the reason you need this is that the whole idea
of having static tools (such as sash) really boils down to live recovery.
If you are willing to reboot, you could always hit a boot disk. If you
are trying to use sash, most likely it is because you are trying to
fix the system without a reboot. (Maybe you are working from remote;
or maybe you have servers running that you don't want to shut down,
and which so far have survived whatever you're fixing.)
So you need a way to get a root shell, without rebooting. That means
you either need to log in as root (where root's shell is sash), or
else su to root.
sulogin is needed in case you switch runlevels, dropping to single
user mode without rebooting, via a direct call to init.
Having an alternate root user with a static shell would be fine, you
could then 'su' or login to that user rather than the ordinary one.
Calling it 'sashroot' would be a good idea if the alternate root is
the one with the static shell; BSD uses the name 'toor' to be the
root user with a bash shell, so it might be better not to use that
unless we set 'root' to be the static user, and then have 'toor' as
an alterante root that uses bash (so as not to confuse anyone).
Justin
On Fri, Aug 20, 1999 at 06:23:35AM +0200, Michael Meskes wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 19, 1999 at 05:26:10PM -0400, Justin Wells wrote:
> > I think if you had the following available, you could do a lot:
> >
> > -- sash (includes many common commands as builtins)
> > -- e2fsck, fdisk, mount (repair, create, and mount, incl nfs mount)
> > -- ar, gzip, tar (unpack and install stuff, possible copied from nfs)
>
> >From sash.1:
> More importantly, however, is that many of the standard
> system commands are built-in to sash. These built-in com-
> mands are:
>
> -chgrp, -chmod, -chown, -cmp, -cp, -dd, -echo,
> -ed, -grep, -gunzip, -gzip, -kill, -ln, -ls, -mkdir,
> -mknod, -more, -mount, -mv, -printenv, -pwd, -rm,
> -rmdir, -sync, -tar, -touch, -umount, -where
>
>
> So I guess you need neither mount nor tar nor gzip. And instead of packaging
> a static ar how about adding some ar core to sash? I'm sure the upstream
> author would like that.
>
> > -- su, sulogin (ensure that you can get to a root shell)
>
> Why? Sorry, I missed part of this thread so maybe it was explained earlier,
> but you can boot directly into sash and you can make a root account that has
> sash as shell. I for one have sash as my root shell, but if you don't like
> it why not creating a sashroot, or as BSD (?) names it a toor account?
>
> In fact this was discussed a lot of months ago. I hvae no idea why it never
> made it into the passwd file.
>
> Michael
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