Run0, a systemd based alternative to sudo, announced • Hacker News Board

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

#881

Post by throwaway7356 » Sat, May 04, 2024, 9:11 AM UTC

sfink wrote: post #862

sigil wrote: post #859

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by "great ideas and great implementation / bad execution and bad interface." Is this a plumbing vs porcelain distinction?

Yes? Well, partly. For systemd and pulseaudio, the systems they were replacing legitimately had major problems. There were variants and workarounds that fixed some of these, but no holistic solution that I've ever heard of. There were just so many limitations if you maintained any degree of compatibility. People were (understandably) unwilling to start over and rearchitect something that desperately needed rearchitec…

> Much of this was enabled by a willingness to throw out compatibility with nearly everything. Backwards, forwards, sideways. If I were making a bold and breaking change like this, I would sacrifice compatibility but try to make up for it by bending over backwards to catch as much of the "once working, now broken" wreckage that inevitably piled up as I could, by creating shims and compatibility stubs and transition mechanisms. I'd certainly listen to people's problems and try to work out solutions.

You do realize that systemd was the only init system that offered distributions a migration path from the sysv-rc init scripts?

daemontools, s6, openrc, upstart all did not have this. systemd was the only system caring about migration and backward compatibility...

> Poettering, as far as I can tell is more of a honey badger

As far as I know, he was the only author of an alternative init system that, for example, did actually talk to distributions to understand which problems they have. Unlike the authors of most alternatives that don't give a shit (and in turn nobody gives a shit about their init). To this day you'll find the s6 author just claim "nobody needs feature X from an init" because they themselves might not need it.

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

#882

Post by throwaway7356 » Sat, May 04, 2024, 10:29 AM UTC

aragilar wrote: post #714

Spivak wrote: post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No? Of all the esoteric escape sequences that terminals handle the ones that change colors are well trodden.

There are at least 3 different ways of expressing colour as covered by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code#Colors , and given the wide propensity of newer terminals to misidentify what they are (I know I have some additional checking in my shell startup to unbreak things if needed), and/or bad termcap/terminfo settings on older systems, sending terminal sequences that are apparently supported but are not h…

Will you install a new systemd version on such an old system with wrong termcap/terminfo settings or attached to a physical vt100?

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

#883

Post by throwaway7356 » Sat, May 04, 2024, 10:35 AM UTC

snvzz wrote: post #681

lupire wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you name any?

XMODEM and the like expect the terminal stream to not have garbage added by e.g. run0. The terminal line should be clean between XMODEM at the terminal emulator and at the client end.

Is xmodem still used outside of computer museums (including private computer museums)?

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

#884

Post by throwaway7356 » Sat, May 04, 2024, 10:59 AM UTC

Brian_K_White wrote: post #344

ciupicri wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

# journalctl -f _PID=${your_pid} # option 1 # systemctl status ${your_pid} # option 2 [1]: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/jour... [2]: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst...

These absolutely SUCK as answers to that question. They entirely miss the point. They provide a specific answer to a general problem. The problem with systemnd is it assumes that it's possible for all needs to be predicted and accounted for ahead of time. While "look around at directories and files, and grep within them" works after the fact without any special knowledge or tools. The person who wrote the log file di…

> journalctl... it takes me 18 seconds just to type it.

Sounds like you don't use a keyboard often enough to even remember where the keys are. Not sure I would expect deep (or even shallow) knowledge on UNIX system administration from such a person.

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

#885

Post by karma_pharmer » Sat, May 04, 2024, 1:52 PM UTC

cduzz wrote: post #812

karma_pharmer wrote: post #806

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude you cannot compare DJB to Pottering. DJB is a genius, responsible for all of the non-NSA asymmetric cryptosystems, symmetric cryptosystems, and authenticated encryption algorithms supported by TLS (curve25519, chacha20, Poly1305). He's also the one who got us off of the footgun-by-design, broken-random-number-generator-will-spray-your-privatekey-everywhere nondeterministic nonce signature schemes prior to Ed2551…

What I said was that the first holy war of unix I remember is the DJB vs everyone else. As far as I can tell, as odd as DJB's designs may have seemed, they were and are ... way better than what was and still hold up today; most of the following "lets unix better" designs seem to just adopt some of DJB's designs, typically poorly. Systemd certainly seems to have cribbed elements of daemontools et al, but seemingly non…

I think maybe your memory decieves you?

The great thing about unix is that there are no "wars" over these things, because everybody gets to decide for themselves.

Well at least that's how it was before systemd -- and all of DJB's unix work long predates systemd. By the time systemd came around DJB had been focusing on ECC exclusively for almost a decade.

The way I remember it is that most people didn't understand DJB and just kinda ignored his work, while a bunch of other people recognized what he was on to and integrated his ideas into software with frendlier user interfaces. For example, runit, which is PID1 for Void Linux to this day, and s6, which is PID1 for both Liminix ("NixOS-on-your-wifi-AP") and Spectrum ("Qubes for Nix"). Indeed increasing numbers of NixOS users are ditching systemd for s6.

Anyways I don't remember anything close to a "holy war".

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

#886

Post by throwaway7356 » Sat, May 04, 2024, 4:35 PM UTC

rstuart4133 wrote: post #457

I'm not a fan of sudo. It's does so much it needs BNF to describe it's configuration format. Who knows, maybe replacing the configuration with polkit is a good idea. Still it's a stand alone binary with one clear job to do, simple enough that one person has no trouble getting their head around it so it's not surprising it hasn't had too many problems over it's long life time. This made me smile: > sudo has serious pr…

> which must be in the running for one of the largest bodies of code that must run as root

Have you ever heard of the Linux kernel? Or X11 (which does traditionally run as root until systemd made it possible to not do so)?

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

#887

Post by throwaway7356 » Sat, May 04, 2024, 5:05 PM UTC

fanf2 wrote: post #140

Starlevel004 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But what makes me really upset is this completely unexplainable need to make everything part of one particular init system. There is absolutely no reason to tie your new sudo replacement to systemd. Absolutely none. The systemd developers are tying it to systemd because they are systemd developers. If somebody else made something like this, it wouldn't be tied to systemd. But somebody else hasn't made something lik…

userv has been around for decades https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~ian/userv/

But userv requires code to be written specifically to work with userv, even for seemingly simple tasks as reading files.

See 6.6 Error handling and input streams (eg stdin) on https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~ian/userv/spec.html/ch-n...

systemd's run0 on the other hand doesn't require code to be written specifically to work with it.

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

#888

Post by throwaway7356 » Sat, May 04, 2024, 5:11 PM UTC

tgv wrote: post #145

mike_hearn wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was "obviously" broken why was the xz backdoor such a shock to everyone? Do you personally audit the library dependencies of every tool you run, including core servers that come with your distribution? I think people don't do this. Also, even before the backdoor was discovered, the systemd team were making libxz be dynamically loaded only in the cases where it was needed which would have killed the backdoor dea…

The point is that (even) the systemd maintainers do not vet their dependencies. As an attack vector, it is the (second?) highest level, yet they did not assume the responsibility. Everybody silently assumed they did, hence the shock. > Claims that systemd has bad security have to explain why it was already implementing practices ... No, they don't. It doesn't take away the fact that they did not check xz, and probabl…

> It doesn't take away the fact that they did not check xz, and probably only few of their other dependencies.

Xz is also used by Debian's package manager (both dpkg and apt). Or tar. Or the Linux kernel. Or... It already was a system library on Linux systems before systemd started using it as well.

Your post reads like you have no real idea what Xz is and how it is used.

Btw, do you think the Linux kernel developers are also clueless for using Xz?

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

#889

Post by sigil » Sat, May 04, 2024, 5:51 PM UTC

throwaway7356 wrote: post #880

sigil wrote: post #858

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like s6! One of the key differences here is that s6-sudo builds on, rather than replaces, the standard unix permissions model. s6-sudod listens on a unix domain socket. Unix domain sockets are just files, so they have an owner, group and mode bits. The answer to "who is potentially allowed to run a differently-privileged command?" is just `ls -l /path/to.sock`. For finer-grained access control, a unix domain socket…

> Unix domain sockets are just files, so they have an owner, group and mode bits. The answer to "who is potentially allowed to run a differently-privileged command?" is just `ls -l /path/to.sock`. Yeah, except that is not true. To quote unix(7): On Linux, connecting to a stream socket object requires write permission on that socket; sending a datagram to a datagram socket likewise requires write permission on that so…

Lol okay man. Maybe if you're running FreeBSD 4.2 or HP-UX or some BSD derivative from the 90s. All unix systems from about 2000 on will honor unix domain socket permissions.

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

#890

Post by immibis » Sun, May 05, 2024, 2:24 AM UTC

_flux wrote: post #648

immibis wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead you get awkward state management issues. Will the child really inherit everything it needs from the parent or has systemd forgotten to transmit something? If I chroot and then run0 will that process also run in the chroot? What about systems with older versions of systemd?

I imagine these questions are what might make this project non-trivial, but surely achievable. > If I chroot and then run0 will that process also run in the chroot? That's an interesting question and it's not quite clear to me what should be the answer. For example, one legit answer might be that it would not work at all (in which case you would need to use some other tool that fits your needs), or another would be t…

I expect that when I run "sudo rm /foo" it should try to affect the same file as "rm /foo". Especially when I just checked, without sudo, that /foo was the correct file.