Re: Moving /tmp to a separate partition. Advice?

[Andrew Reid <reidac@bellatlantic.net>]

On Sunday 23 May 2010 18:46:29 Tom Furie wrote:
> On Sun, May 23, 2010 at 10:38:48AM -0400, Andrew Reid wrote:
> >   Setting the *directory* noexec seems very bad, since the exec bit
> > on directories controls the ability to cd to it, and turning that
> > off would make it largely useless.
>
> Just for the sake of argument *why* is setting /tmp rw- a bad thing?
> Surely if you put a file there, you know the full pathname, why would
> you need to list or search /tmp?

  Well, I don't actually know for sure that it's bad, but it seems
to invite broken-ness.

  Recursive Makefiles are notorious for cd-ing all over the place,
but then again, that's usually in the source tree, which may or 
may not be in /tmp, depending where you unpacked it.

  As a theoretical example, I can easily imagine an installer that 
might unpack a set of example configurations into /tmp, and then do
an "ls" to grep out the one that matches the local output of "uname -m"
to select it for further architecture-specific processing.  I can easily
imagine myself writing such a thing.

  So, I confess "making it largely useless" was hyperbolic, but I still
think it's a bad idea.

					-- A.
-- 
Andrew Reid / reidac@bellatlantic.net