On 2014/03/12 09:31 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
On Mar 12, 2014, at 1:12 PM, Goffredo Baroncelli <kreij...@inwind.it> wrote:
On 03/12/2014 06:24 PM, Chris Mason wrote:
Your suggestion also sounds like it places snapshots outside of their parent 
subvolume? If so it mitigates a possible security concern if the snapshot 
contains (old) binaries with vulnerabilities. I asked about how to go about 
assessing this on the Fedora security list:
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/security/2014-February/001748.html

There aren't many replies but the consensus is that it's a legitimate concern, 
so either the snapshots shouldn't be persistently available (which is typical 
with e.g. snapper, and also yum-plugin-fs-snapshot), and/or when the subvolume 
containing snapshots is mounted, it's done with either mount option noexec or 
nosuid (no consensus on which one, although Gnome Shell uses nosuid by default 
when automounting removable media).
This is exactly the same result if following the previously-recommended subvolume layout given on the Arch wiki. It seems this wiki advice has "disappeared" so I can't give a link for it ...

My apologies if the rest of my mail is off-topic.

Though not specifically for rollback, my snapshots prior to btrfs {send | , receive} backup is done via temporary mountpoint. Until two days ago I was still using rsync to a secondary btrfs volume and the __snapshots folder had been sitting empty for about a year. The performance difference with send|receive is magnitudes apart: A daily backup to the secondary disk now takes between 30 and 40 seconds whereas it took 20 to 30 minutes with rsync.

Here are my current subvolumes:
__active
__active/home
__active/usr
__active/var
__snapshots/__2014-03-12-23h00m01s+0200
__snapshots/_home_2014-03-12-23h00m01s+0200
__snapshots/_usr_2014-03-12-23h00m01s+0200
__snapshots/_var_2014-03-12-23h00m01s+0200

I hadn't thought of noexec or nosuid. On a single-user system you don't really expect that type of incursion. I will put up my work after I've properly automated cleanup.

The only minor gripe I have with the temporary mount is that I feel it should be possible to perform snapshots and use send|receive without the requirement of having the subvolumes be "visible" in userspace.

--
__________
Brendan Hide
http://swiftspirit.co.za/
http://www.webafrica.co.za/?AFF1E97

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