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Date:      Thu, 4 Nov 1999 12:42:38 -0500 (EST)
From:      "Crist J. Clark" <cjc@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com>
To:        FreeBSD-gnats-submit@freebsd.org
Subject:   bin/14709: umountall requests possibly mishandled by mountd(8)
Message-ID:  <199911041742.MAA20940@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com>

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>Number:         14709
>Category:       bin
>Synopsis:       umountall requests possibly mishandled by mountd(8)
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       serious
>Priority:       medium
>Responsible:    freebsd-bugs
>State:          open
>Quarter:        
>Keywords:       
>Date-Required:
>Class:          sw-bug
>Submitter-Id:   current-users
>Arrival-Date:   Thu Nov  4 09:50:00 PST 1999
>Closed-Date:
>Last-Modified:
>Originator:     Crist J. Clark
>Release:        FreeBSD 3.3-STABLE i386
>Organization:
>Environment:

	FreeBSD 3.x system with mountd(8) running.

>Description:

	Several users have reported (search the -questions mail
archive on the string 'umountall' for a sample) strange messages of
the form,

mountd[<pid>]: umountall request from <IP> from unprivileged port

Where <IP> is an IP address of the host (not the loopback, however)
appearing in their messages log. No events taking place on the server
in question seems to correlate the the messages.

	I have been able to build a very strong correlation between
the messages and other computers on the local network being shutdown
(see the mail archives,

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=1737357+1744288+/usr/local/www/db/text/1999/freebsd-questions/19991017.freebsd-questions

for some examples from my personal logs). 

	I believe that when machines broadcast their impending
shutdown to the network, the mountd(8) process produces these
messages. The messages worry me for two reasons,

(1) The server is reporting a request from _itself_ rather than the
    machine in question. This means that the server is either spoofing
    itself (very bad) or is trying to talk to itself on an
    unpriviliged port and failing (why would it do that?).

(2) The machine that generates the umountall need not actually have
    mounted a filesystem from the server. In fact, in the example I
    referenced above, only one of the machines that caused a message
    by going down actually had mounted anything from the server. This
    _seems_ to say that any machine on the LAN, regardless of
    permissions to mount, could possibly exploit any problems that
    this message may be hinting to.

>How-To-Repeat:

	From my experience and a quick look over other emails on this
topic, all you need is a FreeBSD 3.x machine running mountd(8), then
bring another machine on the network down (there may be ways to
generate the error by doing something less extreme than shutting down
a second machine, but this is when I observe the messages without
fail).

>Fix:
	
	Origin of problem not yet understood.


>Release-Note:
>Audit-Trail:
>Unformatted:


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