Re: [PATCH] nfs-utils - 1 of 6 - statd - drop privs

[Steve Dickson <SteveD@RedHat.com>]

Hello,

Neil Brown wrote:

>>This first patch allows statd to run as a non-root
>>user. If there is not an rpcuser account (which
>>there is in our world) it will try to use the
>>nobody account.
>>    
>>
>
>An effect of this patch is that if someone does a 'make install',
>statd won't work anymore without some chowning.
>
True.... We do an adduser during the package installation...

>What would you think if just getting stat to run as whichever users
>owns /var/lib/nfs, and printing a warning if it is root.
>
Looking around it appears root owns  /var/lib/nfs.. and the
point of the patch is not to run a root..... I guess it all comes
do to how secure you want statd.... security is never free.... :)
Maybe you could add a compilation flag allowing people
to control it that way...

>The second patch uses:
>   /var/run/rpc.statd/rpc.statd.pid
>as a pid file, which doesn't seem like the right sort of name.
>Either
>   /var/run/rpc.statd.pid
>or
>   /var/run/nfs/rpc.statd.pid
>
>would seem more appropriate, or is there some RedHat standard you are
>following.
>
I had to make it a directory so the pid file could be removed
after the privs have been dropped (i.e. not longer running as root).

>If we did do a chroot in statd we wouldn't be able to remove the pid
>file any more.  We could if it went in /var/lib/nfs, but I don't think
>that is the right place.
>
>Maybe if we held a fd of the pid file open and used ftruncate to
>remove the pid.  Would that work ok?
>
The privs dropping patch (i.e the first patch) makes the chroot no longer
necessary... but holding might work but how would the unlink occur?

>And I wish I knew why you thought mountd needed protection against
>SIGPIPE, though I guess it cannot hurt.
>
TCP aborts.... If a sender has a socket open and the receiver close()s the
socket with data still unread, the sender gets a SIGPIPE.

SteveD.



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