coredumps

Andreas Ericsson ae at op5.se
Thu Dec 6 16:01:19 CET 2007


Andrew Ivanov wrote:
>  
> Andreas Ericsson wrote:
>> I know. I wrote that code in order to be able to run nagios 
>> in a debugging
>> setup. I'm not complaining about changing it, I'm just very 
>> reluctant about
>> not having a quick and easy way to override a setting that 
>> only root can
>> change, and especially so when the option I want to override 
>> only has impact
>> on debugging. Hence my suggestion to make this a config 
>> variable, preferrably
>> overridable with a command-line option.
> 
> One more thing: user can't change his home directory,
> so using passwd entry is reasonably safe.
> 

That's the entire point right there. It's not supposed to be
safe. It's supposed to be convenient. I would actually prefer
if Nagios didn't dump core at all when started as root, because
the core dump can then contain sensitive information. When it's
*not* started by root it should probably dump core by default,
but then your patch doesn't make sense, because one way to
override where it dumps it is to set the $HOME dir explicitly.

In other words "a user can't change this setting, so it's safe"
is *not* the same as "this is a good thing".

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson at op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231

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