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Run0, a systemd based alternative to sudo, announced

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Re: Run0, a systemd based alternative to sudo, announced

#651

> Or in other words: the target command is invoked in an isolated exec context, freshly forked off PID 1, without inheriting any context from the client (well, admittedly, we do propagate $TERM, but that's an explicit exception, i.e. allowlist rather than denylist). I think in practice, this is going to be an endless source of problems, so much so that it won't be adopted. The usual use case of sudo is that you have…

Yeah we had to explicitly set that to No and enable linger to let pulseaudio keep running for users so they can continue to stream sound from their remote browsers in BrowserBox/CloudTabs. Ie at: https://puter.com/app/cloudtabs-browserbox

Your comment was really well expressed btw. Made your thoughts and emotions very clear about this. Inspiring communication skill! :)

Re: Run0, a systemd based alternative to sudo, announced

#652
post #121

I wonder what other existing programs Will Systemd attempt to replace in the future. My bet is /bin/sh, maybe they went further to replace the entire POSIX utilities.

I mean, it already has replaced the shell in a lot of ways. Systemd is basically the one reason why it's feasible to banish POSIX shells to where they belong, albeit still not usually practical.

Re: Run0, a systemd based alternative to sudo, announced

#653

> Or in other words: the target command is invoked in an isolated exec context, freshly forked off PID 1, without inheriting any context from the client (well, admittedly, we do propagate $TERM, but that's an explicit exception, i.e. allowlist rather than denylist). I think in practice, this is going to be an endless source of problems, so much so that it won't be adopted. The usual use case of sudo is that you have…

I think what is perhaps something to consider is how much of an attack surface sudo is and how unaware people are of the fact. Many people think they can configure sudo to be safe to use for unprivileged users, by only allowing specific things to run with it. But they don't realize all the ways it can be abused for privilege escalation. Getting rid of all that configuration removes that false sense of security, which…

I think these problems are basically negligible because the amount of people trying to "configure sudo to be safe to use for unprivileged users, by only allowing specific things to run with it" is negligible. Virtually all users of sudo are using it on their own computer which they are the sole user and ultimately the administrator of. Even in corporate contexts where the company owns the machine instead of the user, I've only ever seen cases where the use of sudo is unrestricted albeit logged. Where are these organizations where developers or syaadmins are allowed to use sudo but only with white listed commands? I don't doubt that some people are doing this, I just think it's not common.

Replacing the whole of sudo with some weird new thing to better support a niche usecase seems disconnected from reality to me.

Re: Run0, a systemd based alternative to sudo, announced

#654
post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

also worth mentioning: Lennart Poettering "Poettering is known for having controversial technical and architectural positions regarding the Linux ecosystem" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Poettering

His positions are mostly controversial because he challenges the way things have been done for a long time. Whenever he presents some new idea/architecture my first reaction is often confusion. Why would he change something that has worked so well for such a long time? But then I take the time to read up on the reasoning behind his ideas and then things start to make sense. Even when something isn't exactly broken, t…

He's controversial because numerous times his ego has so severely clouded his judgemental that he refuses to see egregious bugs in his programs for what they are. Just one example: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/6237#issuecomment-...

The "people hate him because he makes new stuff" narrative is just more ego-protecting cope. Many developers of other new systems are widely respected and appreciated because their stuff works and they stay humble. Wireguard and Pipewire devs don't get hate poured on them in HN discussions because their shit works, solves problems people have, and because they know how to deal with people.

Re: Run0, a systemd based alternative to sudo, announced

#655

I have seldom come across unix multiuser environments getting used anymore for servers. Its generally just one user on one physical machine now a days. I understand run0's promise is still useful but i would really like to see the whole unix permission system simplified for just one user who has sudo access.

You run everything as root or how am I supposed to understand that?

Sudo exists to execute commands with a different user. It's an abbreviation of "switch user (then) do" for a reason.

Most daemons run under a specific user. Things like docker that use a root Daemon are a security nightmare.

Re: Run0, a systemd based alternative to sudo, announced

#656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what is perhaps something to consider is how much of an attack surface sudo is and how unaware people are of the fact. Many people think they can configure sudo to be safe to use for unprivileged users, by only allowing specific things to run with it. But they don't realize all the ways it can be abused for privilege escalation. Getting rid of all that configuration removes that false sense of security, which…

I think these problems are basically negligible because the amount of people trying to "configure sudo to be safe to use for unprivileged users, by only allowing specific things to run with it" is negligible. Virtually all users of sudo are using it on their own computer which they are the sole user and ultimately the administrator of. Even in corporate contexts where the company owns the machine instead of the user,…

My last job was at a UK bank. All our *nix systems were configured with a specific whitelist of commands that could be run via sudo. We found this an enormous pain in the arse when the powers that be decided to deploy ansible everywhere, and found that none of its "become" methods would work if sudo was set up like that.

Re: Run0, a systemd based alternative to sudo, announced

#657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Wayland more complex than X?

The resulting wayland environments are more complex because wayland itself refuses to define/include features that desktop systems are expected to have. This results in a sprawling mess of competing and incompatible interfaces for those gaps that other parts of the implementations (desktop environments) now have to compensate for by including multiple implementations of the same thing based on all these different int…

Stop using the wrong words. You're saying Wayland is too simple and feature incomplete.

Re: Run0, a systemd based alternative to sudo, announced

#658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The important thing for me at least isn't he `-u apache` but rather knowing that `apache` exists as one of the installed services on this box. In the old ways, that was apparent because of the presence of the log file. Granted, this isn't the problem it used to be for us, however, it would come up because we'd have our services named things like `foo-ws` and knowing that `foo-ws` existed on a given box might be trick…

journalctl -f -u Shows you all installed units if you have working shell completion, or 'a ' gets you all units starting with 'a', etc.

correct me if i’m wrong, but i believe the point that is trying to be made is;

a system user/admin has an intuition about files. saying that ‘journalctl -f -u’ (fu, indeed :) and whatever else is inherently undiscoverable, and is a.. basically orthogonal mechanism for handling what should be a simple task. i.e., viewing some logs. it’s far easier to compose and extend from files (what if i only care about the mtime of the log, for instance), than this.

look, i think systemd isn’t.. terrible. i also think it’s suffered a bit of complexity fetishisation, and it seems as though that this resulting complexity may have become invisible to you.

run0 doesn’t seem like a bad idea. but i am wincing a bit at the thought of unrestricted javascript determining access control.

Re: Run0, a systemd based alternative to sudo, announced

#659
post #45

systemd has been a net positive for the linux ecosystem. remember when you had to write bash scripts to start, stop, restart services and handle any other signals you want to send it? nowadays it's a unit file (basically just an ini file) away with relatively straightforward API. and you can actually declare startup dependencies and other useful relationships past just "prepend a number signifying when it should run…

> systemd has been a net positive for the linux ecosystem. You're presuming to speak for an awful lot of people there, on a topic that would be difficult to measure. > since the beginning of systemd people have moaned > it's quite annoying that the armchair linux experts complain Now you're overgeneralizing, and doing so in a dismissive and patronizing way. Here are a few examples of problems I have with systemd: Sys…

Systems isn't blocking the shutdown. Systems is being blocked by a service. Since you are saying that you can't track down the exact service, you must be using a container runtime like docker or LXC which is not transmitting the kill signal properly to the container to shut it down. The container itself then keeps running for whatever reason. This entirely depends on your particular setup and has very little to do with systemd.

Re: Run0, a systemd based alternative to sudo, announced

#660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His positions are mostly controversial because he challenges the way things have been done for a long time. Whenever he presents some new idea/architecture my first reaction is often confusion. Why would he change something that has worked so well for such a long time? But then I take the time to read up on the reasoning behind his ideas and then things start to make sense. Even when something isn't exactly broken, t…

He's controversial because numerous times his ego has so severely clouded his judgemental that he refuses to see egregious bugs in his programs for what they are. Just one example: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/6237#issuecomment-... The "people hate him because he makes new stuff" narrative is just more ego-protecting cope. Many developers of other new systems are widely respected and appreciated because…

> Just one example: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/6237#issuecomment-...

1. He gave a clear reason why it is how it is 2. He realizes it is/might be frustrating 3. even `adduser` will not allow it by default 4. The issue that it still runs the unit even with config errors has been addressed: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/bb28e68477a3a39796... (~2 weeks after the issue was opened)

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