Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2008 09:33:05 -0200 From: "Carlos A. M. dos Santos" <unixmania@gmail.com> To: "Ed Schouten" <ed@80386.nl> Cc: FreeBSD Hackers <freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: [Testers wanted] /dev/console cleanups Message-ID: <e71790db0811190333y6a943b03teba1df92274a8c73@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <20081118213410.GA81783@hoeg.nl> References: <e71790db0810271936r1ce4619an1d64c6aae62c3ec1@mail.gmail.com> <20081028081154.GQ6808@hoeg.nl> <20081118213410.GA81783@hoeg.nl>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 7:34 PM, Ed Schouten <ed@80386.nl> wrote: > Hello Carlos, others, > > * Ed Schouten <ed@80386.nl> wrote: >> About the /dev/console issues: Robert Watson and I discussed this some >> time ago on IRC and what I did in HEAD (not RELENG_7) was that I changed >> TIOCCONS not to take a look at the permissions of /dev/console, but we >> changed it to use priv_check(). This means that right now you can only >> call TIOCCONS as root. I can't really understand why the problem exists >> on RELENG_7. >> >> About making xconsole setuid: I've read the messages you mentioned, but >> I think we could just alter console to call TIOCCONS and just drop >> privileges. An even better solution would be to just get rid of TIOCCONS >> and invent a better solution to capture syslog messages. I can't really >> understand why we want to abuse TTY's to do this. >> >> So I can't say we're working on this, but at least I can confirm the >> issue. > > One solution would be to let xconsole just display /var/log/messages. > There shouldn't be a valid reason to let syslogd print messages to > /dev/console and capture them again using TIOCCONS. We could just > instruct xconsole to read its data from the log files. > > If you save the attached patch as /usr/ports/x11/xconsole/files/ > patch-xconsole.c (create directory first) and recompile xconsole, it > will use the log file. > > I'll discuss this with others to decide if we should take such an > approach. It is not necessary to patch xconsole to accomplish this. Using the -file command line argument would be enough. Be warned, however, that 1. messages sent straight to /dev/console will not show up at the xconsole window; 2. with large files it will become slow and consume lots of memory, because it will load the entire contents of /mar/log/messages to its text buffer; 3. it will show *all* messages, not only the urgent ones, which is not necessarily the desired behavior; 4. it will stop working upon log rotation. -- cd /usr/ports/sysutils/life make clean
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?e71790db0811190333y6a943b03teba1df92274a8c73>