coredumps

[Andrew Ivanov]

Andreas Ericsson wrote:
> > 
> > Can it be that many Nagios community people have to set $HOME to
> > ~nagios because of no homedir determination?
> > 
> > $HOME points to ~root unless explicitly set, and surely nagios can't
write
> > there.
> 
> The point is that when run as root, nagios really shouldn't dump core,
> and especially not if it has read anything in /etc, since the coredump
> can then contain snippets of files best kept for the eyes of root only.
> 
> > And.. I was confused with the fact that '$HOME' is not nagios's home.
> > 
> 
> You don't have to start nagios as root. You can do
> 
> 	su - nagios -c "nagios -f nagios.cfg"
> 
> in your startup script.

I think it's a mistake. Nagios drops privileges if ran by root.
And there is invocation line from the source example daemon-init script:

$NagiosBin -d $NagiosCfgFile

there is no 'su' at all. 'su -' is used also, but only in pre-cmd phase:

su - $NagiosUser -c "touch $NagiosVarDir/nagios.log $NagiosRetentionFile"

I use similar script and can see that all Nagios processes are owned by user
nagios,
but HOME=/root (as expected)!

> 
> > I just wanted to make things a little easier to configure.
> > 
> 
> In that case, make it a config variable in nagios.cfg. Something along
> the lines of "runtime_directory" or something should work ok, and make
> nagios bail if it can't change to that directory when daemonizing. It
> doesn't change directory at all unless it goes into daemon mode.

It will be so strange to have one more variable for cores.
There is code from base/util.c:

        /* change working directory. scuttle home if we're dumping core */
        homedir=getenv("HOME");
        if(daemon_dumps_core==TRUE && homedir!=NULL)
                chdir(homedir);
        else
                chdir("/");

Keeping in mind example above (HOME==/root), one might conclude that code
is inconsistent, and will never work without manual intervention.

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

With best regards,
Andrew.


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