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In Which Linus Torvalds Makes An 'Init' Joke (lkml.org)
Long-time Slashdot reader jawtheshark writes:
In a recent Linux Kernel Mailing List post, Linux Torvalds finishes his mail with a little poke towards a certain init system. It is a very faint criticism, compared to his usual style. While Linus has no direct influence on the "choices" of distro maintainers, his opinion is usually valued.
In a discussion about how to set rlimit default values for setuid execs, Linus concluded his email by writing, "And yes, a large part of this may be that I no longer feel like I can trust "init" to do the sane thing. You all presumably know why."
In a discussion about how to set rlimit default values for setuid execs, Linus concluded his email by writing, "And yes, a large part of this may be that I no longer feel like I can trust "init" to do the sane thing. You all presumably know why."
Make no mistake, this is a turf war.
Who's in charge? The user? The kernel? Ring-0?
The answer to this is different depending on the topic. The topic here is init and who gets to say what the rlimits are and how. There are lots of other topics - random numbers, filesystems, network attach-detatch, routing etc. For all these things and many more there has been a turf war along the lines of "We will fix this in the kernel!", "Oh no you won't, we will fix this with our daemon", "Oh no you won't, my userland administration tool will fix this".
This is generally fine, but for each there will be a slashdot thread with many jerks represented.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Don't forget the recent severity 9.8 CVE regarding invalid username handling that Poettering closed as NOTABUG. It's a trainwreck of bad design driven by an egotistic idiot.
you are one of those special idiots my mother warned me about... EWONTFIX/Closed is NOT fixing...
Updating manuals to (now) state that systemd only accepts usernames adhering to: [a-z_][a-z0-9_-]*$? is not a fix.
Systemd hasn't fixed teh issue, they man paged what it doesn't like. someone creating a username starting with a 0 will still get executed as root. Even worse!!! a username with a "." in it will also do it... Periods have been permitted for ages (just not starting...) and this means if a linux machine is part of an AD it could cause issues...
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2017-July/039237.html
> 1. We do not permit empty usernames
> 2. We don't permit the first character to be numeric
> (This also filters out fully numeric user names)
> 3. We do not permit dots in usernames, neither at the beginning nor in
> the middle.
> 4. We do not permit "-" at the beginning of usernames (something which
> POSIX explicitly suggests, btw)
> 5. We require that the user name fits in the utmp user name field, so
> that we can always log properly about it.