More respian developer insanity

On 27/06/2022 15:39, The Natural Philosopher wrote: ....

I'd beg to differ.

Much of the spam around is sent by hacked-into machines(*). So someone else's insecurity becomes my spam problem. It's kind-of why you need a driving licence, is it not? No-one on the net is acting in isolation. Of course, if he keeps it off-net, then fine.

(*) In spite of trying to keep a reasonably tight ship, my webserver fell victim to an apache bug a few months back and was being used to spam. I got figures from hotmail showing how bad things were. As the intruders weren't using root access, cleaning up was fairly straightforward. I tightened the security.

If you're lucky. I still haven't found the manual for life. And what bits and pieces I've found follow Sturgeon's Revelation (ninety percent of everything is crud).

Various negative feedback mechanisms (AIDS, SARS, bird flu, COVID-19) have already kicked in. However, our population continues to rise. If it goes on doubling every 40 years, in 600 years there will be one person for every square meter of dry land on the planet. In 1800 years the entire mass of the planet will be converted into people, crawling over each other like a swarm of bees. Compared to this, climate change is a minor side effect.

Enjoy climate change - it's good for The Economy.

That I don't need to do, I lived through it as a unix developer.

So su was introduced so that users could switch to a different user ID without logging out - root being the most common one switched to. This was in Version 1 AT&T unix - a convenience tool pure and simple.

As for sudo, that exists for a completely different reason. The main reason for sudo was to make it possible to distinguish multiple sysadmins in the logs. The secondary reason for sudo was to make it possible to create limited specialised admin roles. With sudo root login would be banned (nobody would have the root password - it might not even exist) but all admins would be placed into groups with appropriate access provided via sudo.

None of this applies to a single user system where the one user has permission to do anything as anyone in the sudo configuration.

It's amazing how few botnets run on rPis being used by someone logged in as root. Most of them run in unprivileged processes on Windows machines.

The question I was interested in was whether any of the vehement objectors to being root had any good reasons - as expected none did.

There are reasons not to run as root, but they are mostly about protecting the other users on the system or perhaps the other data on the system.

In nearly half a century of using and developing under and for unix I have never encountered one, I'd be interested in an example. I have encountered the opposite fairly often, programs that exit if the effective user ID is not 0.

It also used to be custom for the sysadmin to be logged in as root, this very rarely caused problems (OK I do recall one case of an extremely incompetent sysadmin who couldn't be fired - after the first major screwup the lead devs were given the root password and he was ordered to check with us before doing anything as root). This only really started to be a problem when sites grew big enough to need multiple admins and it became important to know who was doing what as root.

The one thing sudo was not created for was to make people pause and think because they had to type sudo first.

Nice bit of trolling there.

The fundamental principle of Unix/Linux and many other operating systems, is you only run programs at the minimal level of privileged sufficient for it to operate. To use a higher level than needed risks far more severe consequences from both bugs and security vulnerabilities. This includes anything from system files being overwritten, to arbitrary code being run with extended privileges.

That is a completely different issue to running a web browser - a vastly complicated desktop program with numerous bugs and a massive security attack surface - as root.

---druck

There is that - along with it is that many who are sceptical or even pretty strongly convinced that it's all bunkum do agree that we have to wean ourselves off oil/coal/gas and that it's best done sooner rather than later since we're outstripping production by a factor of several million.

Now we could argue for decades about the right alternatives and still be talking about it when oil hits $1000/l or we could start trying them out now and kludge our way to something that works before we run out. We're human, we make a lot of mistakes so we need time to do this, time in which we can burn oil/coal/peat/each other while we fix the mistakes and explore the alternatives.

If it takes fear of climate change to get this happening then I'm all for it regardless of whether the science is good or not. That is why those of us who are unconvinced by the science should shut up about it IMHO and let the fear do its work. We might just manage to retain a technological society that way.

Sshhhh.

Lets not whataboutism with Windows. If you check the your auth logs, you'll see the majority of attempts to gain access to Linux machine is for the root user.

First as its a known account name which is always present (although not enabled for password access from ssh by anyone with any sense), but also if you crack that, you've hit the jackpot and do not require any other privilege escalation exploits to take over the machine completely.

---druck

It is no safer to run it as a user with passwordless sudo access, if it has arbitrary code execution holes they would enable attempting sudo as a trivial privilege escalation and lo and behold the attacker has root.

Windows represents the biggest pool of targets for botnet operators after cellphones - fair point most of them probably run on cellphones these days.

Back in the days when I exposed an ssh port to the outside world I certainly used to see root and a few other common role names occasionally but I also used to see a wide range of first names. With password access disabled they were wasting their efforts.

These days I just leave an openvpn service exposed - that's even harder to break into.

What does this have to do with logging in to the console as root ?

Generally root is not enabled for ssh access at all - I think no has been the default value for PermitRootLogin for as long as it has existed.

The usual rule for root login is to only allow it from places where there is physical security. These devices are specified in securettys on Linux and in /etc/ttys with a secure keyword in BSD.

Quite true - of course taking over the machine completely might get you nothing more than a network connected rPi to play with.

Well that's why anyone with any sense sets a password.

---druck

Running arbitrary code is only one step of the process. It does not afford you the ability to run unlimited quantities of arbitrary code in any context you feel like.

Given enough time, memory and patience, it's a Turing machine so you can do anything. But many exploits do not give you that. For example, let's say you can overrun a buffer and inject and run 50 arbitrary instructions[*]. What can you do with that?

Quite a bit of bad stuff no doubt, but building an attack in this footprint is hard. The more difficult you make the attacker's life, the less likely their attack is going to succeed.

sudo, even passwordless, is another hurdle they have to jump - and wrangling the necessary fork()/exec() etc from your injected buffer is nontrivial. You could try and call system() from libc, but first of all you need to find out the location of that 'system' symbol - and ASLR will put it in a different place each time.

Theo

Pull the other one - its got bells on it.

'Climate Change Denial' is known to be funded by any and all businesses that put profit above wellbeing and anti-pollution measures.

Unfortunately, it seems that climate change deniers share one characteristic: they have occupations, and are involved in sports and hobbies that are not weather dependant.

One straightforward way to find examples is to do a Google search on "cannot run as root". It returns lots of hits, some of which address this particular question.

Top of my search results is steam (which I hadn't thought of). Farther down the list are database applications and graphics applications (both of which I am unsurprised to see). Didn't look to see which may specifically run on Raspbian.

I don't think it was either. I think it was to cause them to stop and type in a password, then have sudo check that the password is correct and that the user is authorized to access root. An alternative to handing out the root password to everyone who is administering the system.

There are many uses sudo was not created for but which it has evolved to address over its long history (in concert with other the evolution of other Unix features/configurations). You can find some referenced explicitly or implicitly on the man page.

I imagine there would be some benefit for logging, as you say. I've never heard anyone mention it before, nor has it been an issue for me. And I'm not sure what sudo did when created because logging at that time was much more primitive.

I did not see sudo used in the latter fashion when it was created, nor for many years thereafter. I was still logging in as root to a variety Sun/HP/NeXT/SGI systems into the late 1990's, some in large shops, whereas sudo appeared around 1980.

The Raspberry Pi system closest at hand, whose OS has probably been updated within the past couple of months, has 35 users in its password file. Certainly, one major reason Unix systems have evolved to have this many users is to keep different users, including both the non-login and login ones, from inadvertently compromising each other's functionality.

You may not wish to use sudo but there are lots of Raspberry Pi clients who may and the present configuration accommodates either situation pretty well. Consider the users who have little Unix experience and do not even realize that sudo provides system-wide access: it's just an incantation they read and type in from their documentation (and I dare say that's why you see wide use of configuration commands written up as "sudo <cmd>" rather than "run <cmd> as root" in documentation). So their routine activity is protected from a certain class of mishaps by their running as non-privileged users. Next, the ones who know more but do want the protection sudo supports. I am the only person logging into a couple of desktop/laptop machines here and I run as a normal user across all of them. sudo is available if I need it. And then there are, e.g., lab managers, who are trying to support many identically-configured machines. They may want to prevent most of their users from having root access altogether, while providing for a few exceptions but prohibiting root login. And they might want to implement all users across all systems. And who knows what else? For them, the price of clobbering even a Pi boot disk may be much higher than it is for you.

Seems to me that the Pi engineers have delivered a sensible, flexible, and well-engineered solution backed by decades of experience, both on their own platform and on others.

Tom

-- /~\ Charlie Gibbs | Life is perverse. \ / snipped-for-privacy@kltpzyxm.invalid | It can be beautiful... X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | but it won't. / \ if you read it the right way. | -- Lily Tomlin

Well yes, but unfortunately that is not what is happening. As we can see especially clearly in the case of Germany, all that fear has been used to drive a massively profitable path to 'renewable' energy, which has completely disguised the fact that Germany hasn't reduced its emissions one iota and is utterly dependent on what's left of its nuclear power, burning filthy brown coal and inadvisable Russian gas.

It's almost as if the leadership knew that climate change wasn't actually a problem, that really needed addressing and the real problem was how to impoverish their citizens by forcing people to buy more crap that they didn't actually need, and still get voted back into power...

We will of course end up with nuclear power in the end, or face societal collapse, because its the only technology that can supply primary energy reliably at a sane cost, ex of fossil.

It's the damage that the 'climate change' narrative is doing in the meantime that is massively worrying.

Putins backers want Easter Ukraine and the Donbas because that's where all the oil and gas is.

We are now facing the third resource war.

Indeed so it is. They want us all to run electric cars, treble the price of electricity and be forced to accept unreliable energy reply from mediaeval technology.

By denying the real nature of climate change and presenting us with a false narrative instead.

Mostly they are government employees or media employees. Politicians academics, journalists who are employed by publicly funded organisations whose future depends on them not being found out telling porkies to people to gull them into thinking they have to accept a massive drop in living standard and unreliable access to massively expensive energy, which they now control completely.

And of course the oil and gas companies who have realised they simply have to pretend to go green whilst renewable energy policy drives up energy prices, trebles the value of their reserves whilst resulting in no drop in demand for their products whatsoever.

Cui Bono?

Who benefits from the climate change false narrative?

All the elites do. Only joe soap shivers in fuel poverty whilst the windmills stop turning and snow is covering the solar panels.

It has:

Yes, they know.