[2356] in SIPB-AFS-requests
sysinfo under IRIX
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Albert Dvornik)
Wed May 1 06:35:54 1996
From: "Albert Dvornik" <bert@MIT.EDU>
To: sipb-afsreq@MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 01 May 1996 06:35:39 EDT
I have just compiled and installed sysinfo for IRIX 5.2 in the outland
locker, since it is not installed for IRIX by the Athena release.
In order to get its full functionality, however, one needs to make
sysinfo able to read /dev/kmem; the best way of achieving that seems
to be making it setgid sys.
Are there any possible problems with doing this? Concerns that pop to mind:
(1) The acls on the outland locker are fairly liberal.
But unless I'm mis-understanding something about the interaction
between setuid bits and AFS, people shoundn't be able to muck with
the setgid binary itself...
(2) sysinfo reads configuration files that partially specify things to
look at from /mit/outland/share/lib/sysinfo-3.1.3/.
By modifying the configuration files, people can get sysinfo to
read any named kernel variable they please; it may be possible to
coerce it into reading any part of /dev/kmem. How much do we care?
Whatever you decide, please keep me posted...
--bert
