RE: [PATCH 0/3] Advertise OS version

[<rsbecker@nexbridge.com>]

On Wednesday, June 19, 2024 10:20 AM, Dragan Simic wrote:
>On 2024-06-19 16:01, Christian Couder wrote:
>> On Wed, Jun 19, 2024 at 3:50 PM Dragan Simic <dsimic@manjaro.org>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> > I don't mind if this is present but disabled by default, but then I
>>> > guess it is not really serving much of a purpose, as hardly anybody
>>> > would enable it. Which makes collecting large-scale statistics by
>>> > hosting providers pretty much useless (and I don't think it is all
>>> > that useful for debugging individual cases).
>>>
>>> I agree that it should actually be disabled by default, for privacy
>>> and security reasons, but that would actually defeat its purpose, so
>>> I'm not really sure should it be merged.
>>
>> One possibility is to send just the `sysname`, described as 'Operating
>> system name (e.g., "Linux")', field of the struct utsname filled out
>> by uname(2) by default.
>>
>> It should be the same as what `uname -s` prints, so "Linux" for a
>> Linux machine, and might be acceptable regarding privacy concerns.
>>
>> And then there might be a knob to deactivate it completely or to make
>> it more verbose (which might be useful for example in a corporate
>> context).
>
>I'd be fine with advertising "Linux" (or "Windows") only by default, because it
>doesn't reveal much from the privacy and security standpoint, but allows rather
>usable statistics to be collected.
>
>A configuration knob that would allow it to be disabled entirely, or be enabled with
>more details to be sent would also be fine with me.

While in the code, can I suggest including the OpenSSL version used in the build? This came up in at a customer a few weeks ago and they could not answer the question of what git build they were using. Turned out it used the wrong OpenSSL header compared to what they had installed.