coredumps

[Andreas Ericsson]

Andrew Ivanov wrote:
> 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.

Yes, but it doesn't *need* root, so you can have it drop privs before
even starting.

> 
>>> 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.
> 

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.

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

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
SF.Net email is sponsored by: The Future of Linux Business White Paper
from Novell.  From the desktop to the data center, Linux is going
mainstream.  Let it simplify your IT future.
http://altfarm.mediaplex.com/ad/ck/8857-50307-18918-4