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Re: possible bugs in xfs-related packages



On 23/11/99 Henrique M Holschuh wrote:

Maybe the xfs packages will need to be started already suid to a xfs user
after all... :-(

I have been meaning to bring this up...

I assume you mean its running into permission problems with /var/run/xfs.pid? (i can't think of anything else it needs privileges for that it does not have as nobody)

this would be solved by the subdirectory in /var/run that xfs can write to its pid.

and further to this, xfs should not be run as nobody, I do not think anything that writes to files anywhere should be running as nobody but rather its own user (please see recent archives on this)

also xfstt runs as root till it gets a connection then it forks as nobody, i think it should not run as root at all but the maintainer (Stephen J. Carpenter) is not going to change this unless there is a xfs user defined in debian for this use. (Wichert I think your maintainer of base-passwd, comments?)

we have at least 3 xfses: xfs-xtt, xfs, xfstt I propose that one user (xfs) is allocated for use by all three, they would be *started* as user xfs and always run as user xfs anything they need to write to should be make writable by user xfs, in this case the pids should be placed in /var/run/xfs which is writable by the xfs user. /tmp/.font-unix would be owned by the xfs user and /var/cache/xfstt would be writable by xfs.

I do not think it is much of a risk to have xfs and xfstt sharing this account but i think its much better then them sharing the nobody account along with other things...

also I think that there should be no files anywhere owned by nobody and currently that is required because the xfs's run as nobody.

just as a note, redhat runs xfs as user xfs full time, its never root. redhat gets around pid file problems with a kinda gross /var/lock/subsys concoction, but i think /var/run subdirectories is better.



Best Regards,
Ethan Benson
To obtain my PGP key: http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/pgp/


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