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Multiple Linux Distributions Affected By Crippling Bug In Systemd (agwa.name)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the 51-character-exploits dept.

An anonymous reader writes: System administrator Andrew Ayer has discovered a potentially critical bug in systemd which can bring a vulnerable Linux server to its knees with one command. "After running this command, PID 1 is hung in the pause system call. You can no longer start and stop daemons. inetd-style services no longer accept connections. You cannot cleanly reboot the system." According to the bug report, Debian, Ubuntu, and CentOS are among the distros susceptible to various levels of resource exhaustion. The bug, which has existed for more than two years, does not require root access to exploit.

2 of 508 comments (clear)

  1. Re:RTFA, please. by F.Ultra · · Score: 0, Troll

    It's not only mature, it's also unmaintained. There is no white hackers looking at the code so there might be crawling with bugs that we do not know of. And with SysV there is also the problem with the init scripts themselves, recently there where a vulnerability with the MySQL wrapper script. The incentive to switch would be among other things, much simpler unit files, far better logging, no difference between distributions, possibility to automatically restart crashed deamons, cgroup control for the daemons and so on.

  2. Re:Systemd was SUCH A GREAT IDEA by dbIII · · Score: 1, Troll

    Yes.
    Since office politics at RedHat decided this was the way to go and because they are putting in a lot of resources then that's the way it's going.
    Also the way Lennart lobbied the gnome people to made things depend on systemd was very political. If you want the current gnome you need systemd or an extremely complicated workaround to make it multi-platform again.