Not running the server as root

[David W. Hankins]

On Tue, May 17, 2005 at 09:57:20PM +1000, Andrew Pollock wrote:
> Details on the patch can be found at
> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=308832

On first glance, the patches as presently distributed in FreeBSD /usr/ports
look to me to be more complete (not the least of which is due to including
a chroot() and jail() implementation).

I think the 'capability' flag setting is overhead.  We never open new
sockets after initialization - so long as you put the setuid calls after
configuration parsing (which you should do anyway since these should be
config-file configurable) there's no need for those capabilities.

But I'll make a note that this is a competing patch for this feature
set.

> My personal preference is to get this sort of stuff rolled in upstream.
> 
> What's the general opinion of something like this?

We're looking very closely at the FreeBSD ports changes, and these features
are definitely something that 'must' appear in a 3.1 release.

You'd have to ask the ports maintainer, but I assume you would be most
welcome to include their changes in whatever upcoming debian releases.

As it stands, these changes in ports represent a fork of our software, and
it would be good if the number of forks remained a relatively low number
until we can get a feature release out to address them.

> Martin Pitt is the Debian and Ubuntu developer who made the initial patch,
> so any followups should include him.

Thanks for the submission.

-- 
David W. Hankins		"If you don't do it right the first time,
Software Engineer			you'll just have to do it again."
Internet Systems Consortium, Inc.		-- Jack T. Hankins