Date: Mon, 23 Feb 2004 17:45:07 +0000 From: Colin Percival <colin.percival@wadham.ox.ac.uk> To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Subject: What to do about nologin(8)? Message-ID: <6.0.1.1.1.20040223171828.03de8b30@imap.sfu.ca>
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
As anyone who reads cvs-all (or Mark Johnston's wonderful
summaries thereof) will know, I recently added logging into
nologin(8): Instead of simply printing an error message, it
now (via syslog) records the refused login attempt.
For security reasons, nologin(8) must be statically linked;
as a result, adding logging has increased the binary size by
slightly over 100K (on i386). For historical reasons (which
is to say, "nobody seems to know why"), nologin is located in
/sbin, which means that this has a non-trivial effect upon
the space used on the root partition. Some people are unhappy
about this.
I can see a number of possible options; I'd like to hear
opinions on which would be the best.
1. Leave everything as it is right now.
Pro: Simplicity; logging is useful.
Con: Bloating of the root filesystem.
2. Revert to the previous situation, without any logging.
Pro: Saves space on the root filesystem
Con: Logging would be useful.
3. Move nologin(8) to /usr/sbin
Pro: There is no reason for nologin(8) to be in /sbin,
since it isn't needed in single-user mode; this
would retain logging without bloating the root fs.
Con: Everyone who has hard-coded /sbin/nologin would
have to fix their code.
4. Move nologin(8) to /usr/sbin, leave a symlink behind.
Pro: Any time that users would be trying to log in,
/usr/sbin should be mounted, so this should give
the desired behaviour without bloating /.
Con: [ -f /sbin/nologin ] would fail, which might be
problematic.
5. Move nologin(8) to /usr/sbin, and leave /sbin/nologin
behind with logging disabled.
Pro: System administrators who want to record logins
refused by nologin can do so easily; anyone who
doesn't need this will see the same behaviour as
in the past.
Con: Having two different binaries with the same name
in the path might cause problems.
6. Get rid of nologin(8) completely, and tell people to
install Wes Peters' sysutils/no-login port instead.
Pro: It would save space on the root filesystem, and
even reduce buildworld time by somewhere around
half a second. :)
Colin Percival
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?6.0.1.1.1.20040223171828.03de8b30>