On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 11:05:04AM -0500, Nicolas Williams wrote:

> One possibility is to have a daemon that does authorization and all the
> work.  So the pkg utilities talk to the daemon and the daemon checks that
> the euid of its callers has the right authorizations, and goes from
> there.
> 
> SMF works this way.

How is this different from having pkg do the work itself?

> Such a daemon would have to run with privilege, but then you run into
> secure NFS (if an image is remote).  Oops.

Yeah, I'm not sure I care too much about that case, and would be willing to
just let that fail.

> I think partial failure is something that can always happen unless you
> have a system with atomic transactions.  Applications that manipulate
> lots of files as part of their transactions don't usually implement
> atomic transactions.  (But with ZFS around...)

Well, what *is* the expected behavior on partial failure?  What would
happen if you changed your user information and had write access to
/etc/passwd but not /etc/shadow?  (I hope that's not too much of a
stretch.)  It's true that you can only truly avoid the problem with
transactions, but what do you guys who live by and die by privileges and
profiles expect for a good citizen to do, generically, in this kind of a
situation?

Danek
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