Something else worth mentioning is that 'trackerd' is a security nightmare waiting to happen. It is like a ticking time bomb delivered with the OS. Any program which opens files becomes subject to corruption or maligned access. In the typical file user scenario, the user decides which files to open and with which software and under what user ID. In the 'trackerd' scenario, the indexer will attempt to open any file it thinks it recognizes and any defect in the file reader could be exploited to cause harm.
I have collections of files here which were intentionally designed to cause harm to the programs which open them. If 'trackerd' was to attempt to open one of these, then it may misbehave. Sun has traditionally been very slow to respond to file based security exploits. It took seemingly forever for Sun to respond to a PNG security exploit. It took almost two years for Sun to respond to an ImageMagick exploit where arbitrary Unix shell commands could be executed by simply opening a file. The actual exploit existed for perhaps seven years. The fix was finally delivered in a patch just this last week so the problem may still exist in unpatched Solaris 10U6. Bob ====================================== Bob Friesenhahn bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/ GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
