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How does
systemd-run/run0handle what/etc/sudoerscurrently does?I’m disappointed in how little technical discussion there is in this thread.
Idk
Systemd has always been about “don’t ask questions or well call you obstructionist and old”.
Looking at the implementation, it doesn’t really implement sudoers or tools like sudoedit in any way.
systemd-runhas already been an existing tool for quite some time and this is really just a different CLI for it. That tool asks systemd to make a temporary new service and immediately run it. That, in turn, requires blanket yes/no approval fororg.freedesktop.systemd1.manage-unitsvia polkit.So with run0, you can either do everything or you can do nothing. In-betweens are just not a thing at the moment. There’s very little new backend code running as root.
run0 bashshould behave very similar to something likesystemd-run --uid=0 --gid=0 --wait --same-dir --send-sighup --pty --pipe --collect bashand the majority of those options have been available for quite a while.sudo is overkill for most users tbh
Yeah I think I’m the exception but I just use
suat homeso is systemd
Actually no. The thing is just that systemd handles so many things that makes the lives both developers/distro maintainers and users easier, but most of it happens in the background. You can forget about having to learning complexer tools, just do it all via systemd
Don’t we already have polkit and pkexec for that?
invoking them is kind of a pain, my sole experience with it was meson/ninja using it but then that default was removed and I’ve never been able to put it back to satisfy my curiosity of how it’s done
Well I’m not a fan of systemd to begin with…
This is great. Not having the attack surface of
sudo(and not even being a SUID binary) certainly are great additions.And I hope people realize that
systemdis not one large thing, but a (large) collection of tools.The attack surface will be a systemd daemon running with UID=0 instead, because how else are you going to hand out root privileges?
So it doesn’t really change anything to the attack surface, it just moves it to a different location.
That already exists.
systemd-runis already available today. So the attack surface would be smallerNot really, because you’re now going to make it do more, i.e. incorporate the functionality of sudo and expose it to user input. So unless you can prove that the newly written code is somehow inherently more secure than sudo’s existing code, the attack surface is exactly the same.
This is great. Not having the attack surface of sudo (and not even being a SUID binary) certainly are great additions.
And I hope people realize that systemd is not one large thing, but a (large) collection of tools.
XZ-utils rings a bell ? It was among others Debian wanting to pull in part of a systemd tool into openssh and that almost turned into a world wide disaster :(
I didnt understand that sentence. Is that what you meant?
Among other things, Debian wanted to integrate a part of the systemd tools into openssh, which almost led to a worldwide catastrophe
xz is not part of systemd or openssh afaik.
You didn’t follow the XZ-utils story ? The malicious actor worked for years on that XZ backdoor that targeted the fact that some Linux distributions were modifying their openssh package to enable systemd notifications.
Ok true, it was a systemd dependent issue. But it only makes sense to have those notifications. The problem is dependency on small hardly maintained products, which systemd will improve by centralizing it.
And where do maintainers for the new parts of systemd come from? The larger systemd grows the more parts of it will be neglected. Also in regard to people checking commits, opening up doors for exploits like the one in xz.
I dont know but for sure has pros and cons
But it only makes sense to have those notifications.
Maybe in your mind it makes sense. Going for ease of use rather than security is not something that OpenBSD would quickly do. If you read some more about what “jwz” has to say about all the screensaver bugs in Linux, like here : https://www.jwz.org/blog/2021/01/i-told-you-so-2021-edition and realize what a mess that Linux maintainers are making again and again, and then have a look at Debian and their packaging of xscreensaver. Guess what ? Debian added some systemd thingie to xscreensaver. 🤯
I like Debian since a long time and I use it. But the tinkering of Debian package maintainers and always wanting to do things the Debian way is not something I am always very pleased with. Remember the OpenSSL Debian fiasco ? That shows a problem with Debian which may still exist. Too many packages, not enough maintainers with enough spare time, and no coherent team work of a security team.
You are talking about Debian holding back random packages for stability. This is of course not very cool but it needs to be tested.
I am very much in favor of isolate app environments controlled by upstream devs, containerized and with a permission system. The system is made by the distro, and can be stable and very tested, and the apps are simply isolated and made by upstream.
There is no xscreensaver on Wayland and I think this will not come back?
Kinda feels like writing a script that implements the
sudoCLI but callspkexecwould be an easier way to do it. Given that so many systems already come with bothsudoandpkexec, do we really need yet another option?The point of this is to implement some form of privilege escalation without the SUID mechanism.
sudo,pkexecanddoasare all SUID.
I’ve had to scroll down eight pages to find a post that seems to actually address the good points raised in the article.
that
systemdis not one large thing, but a (large) collection of tools.Who don’t work without Systemd. And Systemd can’t coexist with tools in the same repo doing the same job in a portable way.
I think Chimera was it (?) which tried to have Systemd and Runit and others in the same repo. With lots of wrappers and shims. Not because of Runit & co.
Right. That reminds of the time I was visiting a friend who had broken his Linux computer (No, not “apt-get remove --purge systemd” but they did something slightly similar). When I booted from a live Linux, used chroot and wanted to use configure networking : FAIL because systemd was … not running. As he had no Internet because of his broken machine this caused some delays in fixing this but we got the job done eventually.
Just like gnu utils.
But gnu utils work on BSD and others, while Systemd is Linux only.
Dudes trolling, right?
However, distributions like Fedora will definitely be in the lead, judging by previous experiences and stories of adapting new Linux technologies and Systemd components.
I wonder if this is still true, now that he no longer works for RedHat, but Microsoft.
I wonder if this is still true, now that he no longer works for RedHat, but Microsoft.
Why wouldn’t Fedora do that? Decisions are decided by multiple people, they are not forced through or just decided unilaterally by one person.
Enough people in Fedora try to improve the low level stuff. I’m looking forward to that homedir systemd stuff. Don’t care about this sudo alternative.
Decisions are decided by multiple people, they are not forced through or just decided unilaterally by one person.
Unless you’re talking about GrapheneOS, but that’s an horror story for another night 🤣
When does systemd stop? Linux without it is increasingly looking unlikely in the future. Are we not worried about it being a single point of failure and attack vector?
This isn’t a moan about the unix philosophy btw, but a genuine curiosity about how we split responsibilities in todays linux environment.
@Olap
I agree. As someone who uses systemd on daily basis (I use Arch, BTW 😄) I really like it, but I am a bit worried about it being a single point of attack. Maybe just push doas as default instead? I never used doas but I watched few videos about it, so I guess it’s fine and probably better than sudo (less bloated).
Just my few cents.I don’t see how something would be inherently easier to attack if it is called systemd-foo instead of just foo. Attack surface and vectors do not depend on which project develops a particular tool.
I’d be willing to bet it’s people fearing another xz-like situation
When does systemd stop?
“systemd announces a repleacement module for the kernel”
HurD
SystemD will consume the entirety of Linux, bit by bit.
- In 2032, SystemD announces they’re going to be introducing a new way to manage software on Linux
- In 2035, SystemD will announce they’re making a display system to replace the ageing Wayland
- In 2038, the SystemD team announces they’re making their own desktop environment
- In 2039 SystemD’s codebase has grown to sixteen times its size in the 2020s. SystemD’s announces they’re going to release replacements for most other packages and ship their own vanilla distro.
- In 2045 SystemD’s distro has become the standard Linux distribution. Most other distros have quietly faded away.
- In 2047, SystemD announces they’re going to incorporate most of GNU into SystemD. Outrage ensues from the Free Software Foundation, which vehemently opposes this move.
- In 2048, Richard Stallman dies of a heart attack after attempting to clone SystemD’s git repo. SystemD engages in a hostile takeover and all resistance within the FSF crumbles
- In 2050, SystemD buys the struggling RedHat from IBM for $61 million.
- In 2053, most world governments have been pressured into using SystemD.
- In 2054, Linus Torvalds, fearing for his life, begins negotiations to merge kernel development into SystemD
- In 2056, the final message on the Linux kernel development mailing list is sent.
- In 2058, Torvalds dies under suspicious circumstances after his brand-new laptop battery explodes.
- In 2060, SystemD agents assassinate the CEO of Microsoft.
- In 2063, after immense pressure from SystemD-controlled human rights organisations, Arch developers discontinue development.
- In 2064, the remaining living Debian developers release the next stable version of their clandestine and highly illegal distro.
One way to notice a person has “systemd derangement syndrome” is by looking at how they write
systemd: if they write itSystemDthey are already in late stages of SDS and it isn’t curable anymore.Either that, or it’s a joke.
Debian already uses systemd.
Debian in many ways isn’t as slow-moving as people think.
For example, they moved to Wayland by default (for Gnome anyway) in 2019. A number of well-known distros likely won’t have that until 2025/2026 or beyond.
Sadly they’ve been dropping archs throughout the years, meaning they’re no longer the distro you can use to run on “anything” from a pi to a mainframe…
Doesn’t trixie still support like a dozen arches? I think one of the more recent deprecations was MIPS BE which is functionally obsolete in 2024, at least insofar as practically no one is using it to run a modern distribution.
If your bar is “modern distribution” stick to Ubuntu.
If you want to maintain older hardware Debian used to be a go-to solution.
What’s the go-to solution now?
Bookworm, Trixie, and Sid all currently support a total of 10 different architectures.
And looking through the Wikipedia article for Debian’s version history, most of the dropped architectures were functionally obsolete when they were dropped, or like the Motorola 68000, when support was added. (notable exceptions being IA-64 which was dropped 4 years before intel discontinued it, SPARC which is still supported by Oracle, and PowerPC.)
Dude if you made a movie or novel about this that would be awesome
I think you might want to recheck the ages of some of the people in your timeline, most of them aren’t that young anymore.
Yes, because it’s easier to take care of octogenarians than people who might actually put up a fight to having their laptop batteries replaced with a pipe bomb.
This is a script of Simpsons episode and Torvalds will actually die in 2058.
Probably the weirdest joke comment I’ve ever read.
Thanks for that write up. Made my day! 😄
That comment was brought to you by an AI LLM. No one actually took the time to write that.
🥴
Nope, doesn’t have any of the hallmarks of an LLM and LLMs aren’t yet clever enough to produce original humor like that.
By this logic the Linux kernel is also a single point of failure and attack vector.
sudo isn’t going away, so does doas. run0 is just another alternative to use or not.
There are still distribution out there without systemd and if there ever won’t be any systemd-free distributions left and systemd would become a critical part of the Linux ecosystem, then it would get the same treatment as the Linux kernel with many professional maintainers.
plus, it isn’t like this isn’t exactly like adding another “door” to the “systemd building”. It’s a modular component of systemd, so more akin to replacing the sudo building with a new, but still separate, systemd sudo building
Systemd is a bit of a hassle to be rid off, but thankfully it’s not actually that hard, the hardest part I found was converting systemd services to whatever init system I use.
I wonder how many hours you sunk into that practicality-free, weird-philosopy-dependent project
took me about an hour to get started with artix originally, and maybe a couple more to really familiarize myself with the init. As for practicallity, it’s been a large improvement for me.
Probably not much time, a lot of packages come with init scripts anyway, and they’re pretty trivial to write if not.
You can certainly argue it’s a philosophical choice, I’d say it’s more down to recognising the many poor architectural choices in systemd, rubbing agaist its many pain points and misfeatures and being alarmed at the size of the attack surface it exposes. I understand there is an effort underway to reduce the size and complexity of the main shared library to help address the last point, but just the fact that is necessary shows the scope of the problem.
Systemd is fine. If it wasn’t, most distros wouldn’t have switched to it years ago.
Let’s agree to disagree on that point. Redhat switched because they invented it, and so took all the RHEL derivative distros with them. Debian switched to prefer it after a rather contentious vote and so took all the Debian derivative distros, including Ubuntu, with them. That just leaves a lot of the smaller distros, most of which seem to have stuck with sysvinit or similar as far as I can see.
The arguments against systemd are very unconvincing but more importantly, there is zero evidence that they actually matter.
And it works.
Further, in order to represent this as a nearly unilateral decision you failed to mention that arch, centos, and opensuse all opted in independently.
And no offense but angry Internet randos arguing software philosophy will never convince me to disagree with the creator of the Linux kernel.
Linus Torvalds said:
“I don’t actually have any particularly strong opinions on systemd itself. I’ve had issues with some of the core developers that I think are much too cavalier about bugs and compatibility, and I think some of the design details are insane (I dislike the binary logs, for example), but those are details, not big issues.”
I obviously find the arguments against systemd more persuasive than you do, and that’s fine, it’s all open source and we can all make our own choices about it. My experience with it over the years has been, and still is that it vastly over complicates things that used to be simple, often the less commonly used parts just don’t work right (the automounter is a particular bugbear of mine, and few distros seem to use the network management component). The arguments do matter in practical terms as they directly impact how it works.
Of the distros you mentioned, centos is a RHEL derivative and so wasn’t independent, arch packages multiple init systems, but yes, I’d forgotten opensuse, and they seem to be firmly in the systemd camp.
I may be an internet rando, but I’m not actually angry, more just disappointed. I’d agree with Mr Torvald’s opinion that some of the design details are insane, but I think they are more fundamental than just ‘details’ as many are to do with the fundamental concepts around what systemd is and how it works. Linus can be a real dragon around changes to the kernel, but he’s always tended to be more relaxed about the layers above it.
That the developers of systemd are ‘much too cavalier about bugs and compatibility’ is surely clear to anyone who follows the relevant mailing lists and bug trackers, and should alarm everyone.
Gentoo, Slackware and Devuan can be used without svchost for linux.
They’ll only stop when they rebrand it to systemd OS.
Gentoo, Slackware and Devuan can be used without svchost for linux.
https://nosystemd.org has a list for more choice for readers.
Debian works fine without systemd too, there’s a page on the wiki on how to install without it, or remove it after the fact.
A lot of debs add services to systemd, do those just skip that part?
They seem to. Debian explicitly supports multiple init systems, sysvinit being the primary alternative, so packages have to handle systemd-init not being there.
Easy with
sudo apt remove --purge --allow-remove-essential --auto-remove systemd:
:-D Time to go outside.
Whp is this “Lennart Poettering” character, anyway? I suspect he might be secretly working for Microsoft.
It stopped being secret a couple of years ago.
Not that I’m opposed to a better sudo alternatives, but I find it rather ironic that one of the reason stated is the large attack surface, considering systemd is a massive attack surface already.
This isn’t exactly a “new” attack surface, so removing the attack surface that
sudo(and alternatives) is, is probably a net positive.That attack surface is not vanishing. It’s would be relocating the same attack surface to something that might have an xz library in memory.
- The attack surface is there either way, this is just functionality repackaged that existed already before (
systemd-run, which is calling into PID1) - all compression libraries (actually most libraries at this point) are
dlopened on demand (which was planned even before the attack, which is speculated that the attack was accelerated in timeline because he was on a timer before the change was released)
- The attack surface is there either way, this is just functionality repackaged that existed already before (
As Microsoft and Poettering intended.
Artix, Devuan, Void, Alpine Linux are the way to go
Also Gentoo and Guix as mentioned in the comments
Gentoo LET’S GO
You’re absolutely right, I absolutely forgot about Gentoo although it’s my daily driver
and Guix
sudois already an optional component (yes, really—I don’t have it installed). Don’t want its attack surface? You can stick withsuand its attack surface instead. Either is going to be smaller than systemd’s.systemd’s feature creep is only surpassed by that of emacs.
Or you can use a
doasimplementation like OpenDoas, or maybesudo-rs…Though a Rust clone of sudo that operates in the same way will still have the same problems.
And there’s also doas which is a nice substitute.
I’m not a fan of having root be able to actually login.
Even more so in a true multiuser env where I would rather have privilege escalation be more granular (certain user/groups can esculate certain actions but not others, maybe even limit options of a cmd).
Granted, in a true multiuser environment with an admin who’s carefully tailoring /etc/sudoers to make sure everyone has the least possible privileges that will allow them to still do what they need,
sudois more secure. There’s no doubt of that.On a machine that has only one human user who’s also the admin, and retains the default sudo-with-user-passwords configuration,
suvssudois pretty much a wash, security-wise.surequires a second password to get root access, butsudotimes out and requires the password to be re-entered while a shell created bysucan stay open indefinitely. Which is more easily broken will depend on other details of your situation.(If you’re running an incorrectly configured ssh server that allows direct root login with only password authentification, having a root password could contribute to problems, but the correct fix there is to reconfigure the ssh server not to do something so stupid. I hope there’s no distro that still ships that way out of the box.)
But systemd is modular. They make an offer and distro maintainers and admins get to choose which parts to use
The problem is that those modules are packaged by the developers as opt-out rather than opt-in. It’s a variation on Microsoft’s old embrace-extend-extinguish playbook, only the “extinguish” part hasn’t worked so well because there are some stubborn distros whose needs don’t align with what systemd provides and have maintainers that go out of their way to provide alternatives.
(By contrast, although we may joke about emacs, it’s the myriad of third-party extensions that cause it to just about be its own operating system—it doesn’t all ship with the core.)
systemd’s feature creep is only surpassed by that of emacs.
Tomorrow’s headline: emacs wants to expand to include a Sudo replacement
And after that: emacs wants to include a systemd replacement
:wq
I’d take that over systemd.
As long as it’s not a mandatory switch, I can’t see any issue with this.
In theory it isn’t mandatory, in practice you will see a lot of distros replacing it.
You think? Hardly anyone uses the built-in network stack or the homed thing.
Idk for the network stack, but for homed, I think it’s because it is up to the DEs to support it. As part of the Sovereign tech fund, GNOME is implementing support for it! I think this will be a great step forward for Linux desktop security when it lands
It’s the same drama as with the home directory replacement they announced and that no-one ever used.
homedisn’t exactly a home directory replacement, more of an extension. You can mix and match homed and normal home directories like you want (on a per-user basis at least, not within a single user). It does have some nice things, such as user-password based encryption of the home directory, so the password is required to unlock it (no admin access) or automatically using subvolumes on btrfs.user-password based encryption of the home directory, so the password is required to unlock it (no admin access)
That seems like a very niche feature given that it is only relevant if the admin isn’t the same person as the user but the admin would have to set it up and condemn themselves to hearing endless whining from users who lose their files when they forgot their password.
I don’t know, unless I personally allow the admin to have that kinda access to my files I wouldn’t really want it. And for that case you can enroll recovery keys (which would need to be manually stored, but still) or a fido token or whatever other supported mechanism there is, its LUKS2 backed encryption after all. Then there is also the possibility to just not encrypt the home directory at all.
Let me introduce you to selinux.
In what way does selinux allow your users to lock themselves out of their own home directories in a way that the admin can not fix?
SElinux is a “global ACL.” You can stop root from doing anything you like with it. Usually by accident and without realizing it’s been done in my experience…
No, that is just not true. You can stop root from doing things without a reboot with SELinux but encrypting something with a password root does not know actually does stop them from doing it at all short of a brute force attack on the encryption.
no…nonono… AHHHHH! - Vegita DBZA
But for why (I’m commenting this before reading) wouldn’t it make more sense to home I’m the scope of systemd so it can be easier to maintain? Why have it do everything?
systemd is more of a set of products and software components branded under a single name rather than a single thing.
systemd itself is rather simple, as most other pieces systemd-* software, like systemd-boot, systemd-networkd and systemd-resolvd. these are usually more stable and less bloated than more popular alternativesOh okay I didn’t know that thanks
As long as they can work independently, yes. If they are modular and a distro admin (or just a computer admin) can choose to install and use systemd-x but not install or use systemd-y, we are in good business
Now if you have to take a few you don’t like or need to use so that the one component you do want works, then no
I honestly don’t know enough of systemd to say either way
Most of systemd stuff is decoupled well. You don’t need to use networkd to make use of resolved for example.
Good to know, thanks for the answer
You can’t think of it a single massive project. It’s actually lots of small components.
We could argue the linux kernel is bloated too. The reality is though, provided the project is designed to be modular (as SystemD is), it actually makes sense to keep it together, to ensure there is a standard base and all the components are synchronised fully with their API’s.
It also saves distro’s a lot of effort.
In practice, all those tight coupling between components mean that it behaves more or less monolithic, despite the claims to the contrary. Replacing them with alternatives is a pain because something else breaks or some software has a hard dependency on it.
Oooh okay that makes more sense. Thanks I didn’t know that
distro’s
You can pluralize without the apostrophe. In fact, you never need an apostrophe to pluralize.
It also saves distro’s a lot of effort.
Only if they want to break free.
And they don’t need nfsroot or a separate consolidated /usr mount or, really, a whole host of things that lennart didnt understand and unilaterally broke like an arrogant noob.
But that’s blasphemy.
Why have it do everything?
Isn’t the guy behind systemd a (former?) Microsoft employee? I feel as though that might offer a clue as to why the trajectory towards bloat.
It is. He is poisoning Linux, slowly, from the inside. Like the XZ attack, just smarter and much slower.
The guy who discovered the xz attack was also a Microsoft employee, for what it’s worth.
Maybe they discovered xz attack because they are familiar with these things.
Why do you consider it as poisoning? I’ve heard the argument about not doing things the traditional Linux way (binary logs for example). But if the alternative provides so many benefits, why is it an issue? Systemd is a piece of cake for all parties compared to sysvinit and alternatives, so why is it bad when it solves so many issued, and makes it super easy to use by just adding e.g. a new option to a Unit?
Another example: timers are more complex than cronjobs, but timers offer additional needed features like dependencies, persistence, easy and understandable syntax, and more. So although more complex, once you get the hang of them, they’re a very welcomed feature imo
By itself, solely doing init, it would have been fine, however, binary logging (even if you eventually end up with a text log, that’s wasting disk space on a binary format no one wants or needs), and it didn’t stop there. He keeps replacing Linux subsystem after subsystem, and many of those replacements are not progress, just duplication of effort and creates more ways for configuration drift.
You can still forward to text syslog or to a central logging server like Loki if working with multiple hosts. I still don’t get the issue with binary logs.
Yes, and many distros have that out of the box… But they don’t have it sent to keep the binary journal as close to empty as possible. So you end up with twice the space in use for logs. As for the issue with binary logs, text logs can be read by far more tools and utilities, rather than just journalctl and pipes.
You can set the space limit for journals logs really low then, to avoid double space usage. As for the last argument, that also was an issue for me years ago because not all tools were compatible with the journald format, but that’s since long fixed now and I’ve not experienced any issue for a long time. Journal logs provide a standard format for all applications, so third party tools don’t need to be compatible with every log format of your applications. And it also comes with great additional features like -b or --since etc. So I still don’t get the issue here
Here is the rationale for the Journal. In short it is really not that simple and it has a lot of advantages over simple text files and it saves disk space.
Having the logs twice is saving space, got it. Do you hear yourself?
He’s working for Microsoft now but it’s very recent, he developed systemd while working at RedHat.
I don’t even know of he’s still working on it. There are a lot of things to be said about systemd and Lennart but the link to Microsoft is irrelevant.
I can understand that it makes it easier to add changes that would benefit systemd and distros in general. I read that they introduced run0 to solve long shortcomings of sudo (I’m not aware of which). That sounds logical.
Fuck off Poettering!
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I read the original mastodon post by the developer of run0 and I am still don’t understand what the problem with SUID is.
Whats an example of an attack that would work with sudo and doas (which also uses SUID) and not on run0?
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Thanks for taking the time to explain. I was trying to get my head around on how this works but could not understand much of it. A lot of people here are very much against systemd in all senses, but this sounds like a better approach. Even if it not done as systemd, makes more sense than checking files and getting elevated privileges for a scope and use guardrails everywhere
Agreed, this is a nice inclusion. I also hate sudoers with a passion - I already use
doasbut it’s not standard (in the Linux world anyway), but with systemd providing an alternative means that it’ll become a standard which most distros would adopt, and I hope this means we can finally ditch the convoluted sudoers file once and for all.deleted by creator
The thing with this is: its just a symlink to the
systemd-runbinary, which talks to PID1 to spawn new processes (in separate cgroups IIRC). Its one of the most fundamental parts of systemd. Even the debiansystemdpackage includessystemd-run.I guess the other question is if some tools the distro provides might switch to supporting it by default. For example on Arch there is
makepkgthat should never be executed as root, but does internally call some things with elevated privileges (mostlypacmanto install and remove packages). Currently it checks forsudoand if not falls back tosu, but maybe it might be worth considering changingsuforrun0if its guaranteed to be there.deleted by creator
it does its authorization with polkit (which IIRC defaults to allow all
wheelgroup members) and giving users that shouldn’t be allowed root access, root access, is not something you ever want. This is usually referred to as unauthorized privilege escalation. Also, it isn’t likesudodoesn’t need configuration.
How does doas differ from sudo?
Never heard of the former until now.
doasis quite popular in the BSD world, and was ported to Linux a few years ago (via the OpenDoas project).For starters, it’s is a lot smaller than sudo - under 2k lines of code vs sudo’s 132k - this makes it lot more easier to audit and maintain, and technically less likely to have vulnerabilities.
Another security advantage is that
doasdoesn’t pass on the environment variables by default (you’d have to explicitly declare the ones you want to pass, which you can do so in the config).The config is also a lot simpler, and doesn’t force you to use
visudo- which never made sense to me,visudoshould’ve just generated the actual config, instead of checking it after the fact. Kinda like howgrubbyorgrub2-mkconfigworks. But no need for that complexity with doas.Eg, the most basic
doasconfig could just have one line in the file:permit: wheel. Maybe have another line for programs you want to run without a password, likepermit nopass dexter cmd pacman.Awesome. Thanks for the insight.
Essentially functionally stripped sudo, smaller in size than sudo. See also Pottering’s thoughts about the ecosystem
Nice to see that Mastodon has the same problem as Twitter with people trying to use it for long-form blog posts for some godforsaken reason.
Blame the Mastodon team, if you’re not running a fork, you have to go into the source and adjust the character limit manually.
Nobody has to do it like this, Mastodon supports longer posts since other servers and clients support more, it’s seemingly just a choice from upstream.
Makes sense considering people who moved from one micro-blogging service to another instead of giving up on the idea completely are probably the ones deeply committed to that flawed idea.
I admit, I’m not a big fan of putting more functionality into systemd (or just of systemd in general), but that is a well-reasoned argument for having sudo live in the init system.
