On Wed, 3 Sep 2008, Serge E. Hallyn wrote: > Quoting Miklos Szeredi (miklos@xxxxxxxxxx): > > On Wed, 3 Sep 2008, Serge E. Hallyn wrote: > > > Ooh. > > > > > > You predicate the turning of shared mount to a slave mount on > > > !capable(CAP_SYS_ADMIN). But in fact it's the mount by a privileged > > > user, turning the mount into a user mount, which you want to convert. > > > So my series of steps was: > > > > > > as root: > > > (1) mount --bind /mnt /mnt > > > (2) mount --make-rshared /mnt > > > (3) /usr/src/mmount-0.3/mmount --bind -o user=hallyn /mnt \ > > > /home/hallyn/etc/mnt > > > as hallyn: > > > (4) mount --bind /usr /home/hallyn/etc/mnt/usr > > > > > > You are turning mounts from shared->slave at step 4, but in fact we need > > > to do it at step 3, where we do have CAP_SYS_ADMIN. > > > > Well, that's arguable: I think root should be able to shoot itself in > > the foot by doing step 3. > > Maybe I'm not thinking right, but long-term is there any reason why we > should require privilege in order to do step 3, so long as the user has > read access to the source and write access to the destination? > > I don't think there is. Other than this glitch. That's a powerful > reason to fix the glitch. Agreed, without privileges it's unacceptable to allow step 3 as is. > The other argument is that, frankly, I think most people are still > either unaware of, or confused by, mounts propagation. Letting root > shoot himself in the foot is reasonable only to a point. Hmm, I think there are infinite ways in which root can mess up mount propagation, and this is not even the worst. I'm not trying to belittle this bug: done unprivileged it's unacceptable. But with privileges, I really don't know if we should change the propagation semantics for this corner case, they are complicated enough already. > > Generally we don't restrict what root can > > do. OTOH I agree that current behavior is ugly in that it provides > > different semantics for privileged/non-privileged callers. > > > > Perhaps it would be cleaner to simply not allow step 4, instead of > > playing tricks with changing the propagation type. > > If the user or admin can simply (I haven't tested) > > mmount --bind --make-rslave -o user=hallyn /mnt \ > /home/hallyn/etc/mnt > > then returning -EPERM if --make-rslave was not provided is reasonable > IMO. Right, that sounds perfect. the only problem is, bind mount currently ignores the propagation flags, for no good reason I can see. That's a separate patch though. I'll look into it. Thanks, Miklos -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
