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You might want to stop running atop

rachelbythebay.com

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Re: You might want to stop running atop

#71

Post by d3Xt3r »

refulgentis wrote: post #43
SubiculumCode wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Btop variants, glances, why should I move from htop?

Why should I move on from top? (serious question) I'm genuinely stunned to figure out there's a whole set of lore of *tops. I'm not sure I'm being rational from a textbook security perspective, but, it'd take a whole lot of tangible reward to get me off the binaries supplied with the system.

First of all, btop is included in the default repos of most Linux distros, so you don't need to worry about security. This also applies to htop and glances by the way.

In terms of tangible feature benefits, btop also offers disk I/O stats, network throughput stats, partition usage, and even GPU usage (if your distro compiled it with GPU support).

In terms of "nice" stuff that's non-essential, the overall UI is a lot more user-friendly and in many ways, better (subjectively). Eg there are visual graphs for various metrics, you can filter process names by substring, get detailed stats of a specific process, see the tree view of all the processes, easily show/hide various parts of the UI (eg you can focus solely on the process list if that's the only thing you're interested in).

There are also some distinct advantages the UI offers easier to send specific signals to processes. Eg in btop I can just select SIGSTOP from the menu, whereas in top, I'd need to remember or lookup the numeric equivalent (eg 19 for SIGSTOP).

Other top alternatives also offer similar feature sets. Glances also shows the most recent warning/errors from the system logs), as well as container resource usage which would be handy for some folks.

Re: You might want to stop running atop

#72

Post by kaonwarb »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #54
plorkyeran wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, from a rando this would be just bad vagueposting but Rachel is absolutely someone who could know about a very good reason why we should uninstall atop but be unable to legally say why. I would heed her warning.

I would disagree and still say that this is bad vagueposting. It doesn't matter how reputable the source is: if you say "don't do X" but don't give a reason why, I'm not inclined to listen. Granted I don't use atop anyways, but I don't think a vague blog post - even one from a respected person - is sufficient justification to change what software one uses.

Bayes would like to have a word.

Re: You might want to stop running atop

#73

Post by vanc_cefepime »

keyle wrote: post #46

Is atop included in any distributions? Is there even a tool to search what is pre-installed in each major distribution(s)?

I typed 'atop' in my Linux Mint 22.1 laptop/desktop, says it's not found but can be installed. So I think Linux Mint is in the clear, I tried my Ubuntu 24.04 server and same thing there as well as my proxmox home lab instance. I checked that Repology link and I did see Ubuntu, but I guess that is for Ubuntu desktop but not sever edition?

ps. If I said anything wrong, please correct me. I'm a linux newb who jumped from Microsoft's world after getting fed up with their Win11 BS. I'm still learning quite a bit about linux daily.

Re: You might want to stop running atop

#74

Post by LinuxBender »

Macha wrote: post #67
LinuxBender wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, Linux Mint, SUSE Linux Enterprise, CentOS, Manjaro, elementary OS, Gentoo, Oracle Linux, and Pop!_OS" ~--Google's AI. I am not aware of any that install it by default.

Google's AI has just given you a plausible sounding but mostly wrong list of distros - it's not in the enterprise distros, elementary or pop os

Missing from their output is an upvote and downvote button. Or a debug function that forces it to divulge where it obtained the data.

Wait, now that I think about it why are there Fact Checkers for humans and not for AI?

Re: You might want to stop running atop

#76

Post by sulam »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #54
plorkyeran wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, from a rando this would be just bad vagueposting but Rachel is absolutely someone who could know about a very good reason why we should uninstall atop but be unable to legally say why. I would heed her warning.

I would disagree and still say that this is bad vagueposting. It doesn't matter how reputable the source is: if you say "don't do X" but don't give a reason why, I'm not inclined to listen. Granted I don't use atop anyways, but I don't think a vague blog post - even one from a respected person - is sufficient justification to change what software one uses.

This attitude will eventually burn you.

Re: You might want to stop running atop

#77

Post by mappu »

czk wrote: post #24
dgacmu wrote: post #20

There's a lot of speculation about why, with the answer almost certainly security / exploitable (or backdoor), and I'll just throw an extra little tidbit in: atop seems to run persistently as root, which may be the reason for preventing it from running/uninstalling. the netatop part of atop installs a persistent kernel module, netatop.ko, as part of its installation. The module hooks netfilter to be able to monitor a…

I'm not familiar with atop but the website mentions netatop is optional and what I've found suggests you have to manually install it. Do you know if any distributions/packages install this by default alongside the atop install?

netatop is not in Debian, and the atop package doesn't include any .ko files.

Re: You might want to stop running atop

#80

Post by DominoTree »

czk wrote: post #12
jofzar wrote: post #11

This screams NDA/disclosure but things are so mega super fucked that they feel obligated to pre warn as early as possible. I wonder how long/old the problem is in atop?

Seems like the latest version might be as old as July 2024? https://www.atoptool.nl/allnews.php For anyone interested, here are the latest commits to the GitHub: https://github.com/Atoptool/atop/commits/master/

Skimming through the code (particularly from past issues and PRs) highlights a number of things that look sketchy to me at first glance (in a coding practices way, not in a malicious way) - my gut feeling is that someone smarter than me going through much of this with a fine-toothed-comb would likely find something exploitable.

Rewrite it in Rust. /s

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