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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

#831

Post by blablabla123 »

airocker wrote: post #766
blablabla123 wrote: post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but elevated permissions may be needed from time to time anyway. Either on the client, the baremetal server or the container. Running everything as root is even for containers not recommended. Considering how popular these have become, it's a bit of an irony that systemd isn't available on the container without considerable detours.

One user with sudo for sysadmins on baremetal and a sudo access without CAP_SYSADMIN on container should be good.

I like seeing qmail as blueprint how a secure app that needs elevates permissions should be designed, in fact it has 7 users.

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

#832

Post by chillfox »

9dev wrote: post #781
chillfox wrote: post #733

I am really not looking forward to systemd taking over another part of the system with how unpolished and flaky their replacements usually are. Anyway, I have been using doas instead of sudo for a while on servers, it’s rock solid if you don’t need some of the more advanced features of sudo.

I honestly have no clue what you mean. You can take unit files, journald, timers, and all the other neat features from my cold, dead hands. I’m not going back to writing brittle shell scripts; systemd has made my life SO much easier.

Well, that's wonderful for you, glad it works for someone, but that has not been my experience.

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

#833

Post by gkbrk »

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #361
gkbrk wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use almost any GNU project without depending on all the other GNU projects.

This is different from Systemd how? You can't use any GNU project without depending on GNU libc (except glibc itself, trivially).

> You can't use any GNU project without depending on GNU libc.

Of course you can. Unless they're depending on non-standard parts of libc, you can use any GNU project with other libc implementations (musl, dietlibc, ulibc etc).

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

#834

Post by intelfx »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #787
lupusreal wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

'systemd-run except with privilege escalation' is a thing I wished for for a long time, needed in production. Glad they finally made it, too bad it took them so long. (To be honest, it feels like it should have just been part of systemd-run in the first place.)

I mean, systemd-run could do privilege escalation from day one. It's even the default (otherwise overridable by systemd-run -pUser=). I have used systemd-run --shell on countless occasions when I needed a clean root shell without any traces of the current environment.

What is being announced is merely a thin layer of cmdline syntactic sugar over an existing feature, to make it closer to sudo in usage.

So I'm not sure what exactly you were missing?

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

#835

Post by lrvick »

Between "systemd --user", Linux Capabilities, and containers there is no reason to ever have sudo, or the ability to touch the root filesystem at runtime at all, which should ideally be a signed, deterministic, and immutable image anyway. You can do anything as an unprivileged user these days without risking core system integrity and privilege separation guarantees.

Remember, malware can just alias your sudo command to one that logs your password and piggyback on your next use. If you ever use sudo, then all bets are off on sandboxing malware. Best to not have a ladder to root at all.

Sudo is a crutch for people that have not learned the last 20 years of privilege isolation tech.

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

#836

Post by intelfx »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #692
tommiegannert wrote: post #246

This is playing on the difference between hoping that sudo does the right thing juggling setuid and capabilities, and having a strict IPC boundary between privilege levels. It sounds like a great use of systemd, for those who want to use it.

There's like 3 components involved in making setuid safe (the kernel, the dynamic loader, and your exec), and at least one of them wasn't doing its job correctly (the dynamic loader). IPC by definition involves a superset of these components. There's no reason to think that if you can't make a simple setuid binary safe, you can make IPC safe. IPC is an order of magnitude more involved. Specially because in order to g…

> There's like 3 components involved in making setuid safe (the kernel, the dynamic loader, and your exec), and at least one of them wasn't doing its job correctly (the dynamic loader). IPC by definition involves a superset of these components

Incorrect, because nowhere in the IPC dance are these components exposed to the same untrusted environment as they are with sudo.

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

#837

Post by intelfx »

chillfox wrote: post #832
9dev wrote: post #781

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly have no clue what you mean. You can take unit files, journald, timers, and all the other neat features from my cold, dead hands. I’m not going back to writing brittle shell scripts; systemd has made my life SO much easier.

Well, that's wonderful for you, glad it works for someone, but that has not been my experience.

In the same vein, sorry it doesn't work for you, but that has not been the prevailing experience ;)

(Same goes for "unpolished and flaky".)

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

#838

Post by intelfx »

hmmm-i-wonder wrote: post #742
lolinder wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I could `tail -f *.logs`. I remember how I didn't need to remember about `--no-pager` and `--follow`. journalctl supports -f, which by your own account you were already using for tail, so I'm not clear what's worse there. > I remember how I didn't have to google how to find logs between 10 days ago and 4 days ago, because the logs would be in a .tar created by logrotate with a date in the filename. My memory of thi…

This and many other discussions misses the point that most people that don't like systemd have with it. It can largely do everything it replaces, but differently, in some cases with improvements. Every year it increases its scope of 'problems' its solved. But the issue is it hasn't _ACTUALLY_ solved a problem for me in about a decade, its only introduced problems. Its replaced things that worked perfectly for me and…

> If it actively solved problems for the majority of users we wouldn't hate it so much

It does and we don't. The only "we" who are "hating it so much" is a tiny vocal minority.

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

#839

Post by intelfx »

jordemort wrote: post #299
agilob wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> remember when you had to write bash scripts to start, stop, restart services This was a really big pain, yes, but I also remember how I could `tail -f *.logs`. I remember how I didn't need to remember about `--no-pager` and `--follow`. I knew where the files were, what they were called. I remember how I didn't have to google how to find logs between 10 days ago and 4 days ago, because the logs would be in a .tar cr…

systemd-nspawn is actually pretty great, and is mostly just a tool that exposes functionality that systemd already needs for other reasons. IIRC it was originally developed to aid in testing systemd itself, and was initially shipped as an unsupported extra in case other people found it useful. systemd-resolved is the only way I've ever been able to get dockerd to play nice with Tailscale DNS; it's also the best way t…

> I admit I haven't really seen a huge advantage to using systemd-networkd over NetworkManager yet

I don't think there is one. systemd-networkd is explicitly not for dynamic environments like personal laptops or workstations; it has a scope and NetworkManager is largely outside it.

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

#840

Post by intelfx »

hxelk1 wrote: post #62
kbar13 wrote: 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…

> you can actually declare startup dependencies and other useful relationships In theory, yes. In practice, I had a lot of trouble ordering things correctly in non-trivial cases. > it's quite annoying that the armchair linux experts complain about how "lol systemd is so stupid for reinventing the wheel, give me my shell scripts back" I can only speak for myself, but I don't want the abysmal sysvinit scripts back. I j…

> The problem with systemd is that it's a mediocre solution to many problems

[citation needed]

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