dmesg errors (sgi_fam)

[Russell Coker]

On Wed, 17 Mar 2004 22:39, Martin Ebourne <lists at ebourne.me.uk> wrote:
> Russell Coker <russell at coker.com.au> wrote:
> > The problem is that famd is an application which accepts network
> > connections, wants read access to every file that any user can access. 
> > If you want to have a secure system you don't want many such programs.
>
> Surely it doesn't need access to the file contents - just to stat them, so
> access to directories (still a security issue, I agree).

Giving access to file names is still a security issue.  If it can run with 
only { getattr search } access to directories and getattr access to files 
then it won't be so bad.  Of course being able to remotely monitor what files 
someone is writing too also provides some issues (and for some files the 
names are predictable).

> > Remote famd operation is only for non-polling notifications over the
> > network. For most people having polling for file status changes on NFS
> > will probably be OK.
>
> I agree with disabling remote famd, but the original post appeared to be
> disabling the daemon entirely, which I expect would prevent local file
> monitoring too. Or do gnome/kde use dnotify directly?

I don't think that the command Dan suggested would turn it off entirely.  The 
libfam functionality linked into applications should still do everything you 
want locally.

> Also, I thought RH/Fedora already shipped with remote famd disabled.

Not last time I checked.

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