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In Which Linus Torvalds Makes An 'Init' Joke (lkml.org)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the permissions-please dept.

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."

2 of 359 comments (clear)

  1. Re: You all presumably know why. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Re: You all presumably know why. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.