Re: Fedora 11: moving to posix file capabilities?

[Dax Kelson <dkelson gurulabs com>]

On Wed, 2008-10-29 at 15:02 -0400, Steve Grubb wrote:

> We tried to support this in F-10 by having a test run with ping. We figured 
> that is a simple well defined app that could be used as a test subject. We 
> opened bz 455713 to document the change over. Turns out that people compile 
> their own kernels and do not necessarily turn this on. So, what do we do in 
> that case?

I thought more about this.

How about a check in rc.sysinit to see if the kernel supports
capabilities? 

If the check fails it could do either or both of the following:

1. Display and log nasty warning message
2. Run the command: chmod u+s `cat /etc/posixcapbinaries`

Doing 2. would be the "friendly" thing to give the user a non-broken
system. It does make it a bit more complicated because you'd want some
logic that if they booted back to a kernel with posix capabilities you
stripped the suid bits. Also, rpm verity will complain.

Dax Kelson
Guru Labs