RFC: Fuse packages for Fedora Extras 4 / Fedora Core 5

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

Hi *,

Warren told me to post this to fedora-maintainers, so here I am.

I prepared a fuse package for fedora-extras. From what I'm told it will
probably only be in extras for FC-4 and it seem it might go straight to
core devel/rawhide/FC5. 

Fuse ( http://fuse.sf.net ) allows normal users to mount
userspace-filesystems into the file system ( for a complete list of
filesystems see
http://fuse.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/FileSystems ). The logic for
this lies in a userspace program that is executed as user, but to mount
it needs root permissions. Therefor one file (%{_bindir}/fusermount) is
normally installed suid root (4755) by fuse. 

This might be a security problem and this is the problem with the
current package and the reason for this mail. I posted a RFC on this to
fedora-extras-list (see
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-extras-list/2005-October/msg01506.html
and
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-extras-list/2005-November/msg00120.html
for the whole discussion). Jeremy looked at it and is not very glad with
the suid root executable. I agree with him on this issue, but fuse
simply does not work without it -- not even when you add a
fuse-filesystem to /etc/fstab (for a example see
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-extras-list/2005-November/msg00334.html
). Therefor I now use a suid root binary that is only executable for
members of a special group named fuse. 

This still differs all other packages in core (afaik) -- cifs, smbfs,
ncpfs for example ship also without suid root -- if the local admin
wants to allow users to mount windows shares he has to add them to
the /etc/fstab or "chmod +s /sbin/mount.cifs". This of course is
reverted with every cifs-update. 

So guys, what to you think: Should we ship the binary suid root? Or
simply ship it with the fuse group but don't suid root the binary? Or
without the group (most fuse users/admins will run "chmod
+s /usr/bin/fusemount" then and allow fuse for every user -- this IMHO
is much more worse than the group). Or any other ideas?

Example packages can be found here:

http://www.leemhuis.info/files/fedorarpms/SPECS.fdr/fuse.spec
http://www.leemhuis.info/files/fedorarpms/SRPMS.fdr/fuse-2.4.1-1.src.rpm

http://www.leemhuis.info/files/fedorarpms/SPECS.fdr/fuse-sshfs.spec
http://www.leemhuis.info/files/fedorarpms/SRPMS.fdr/fuse-sshfs-1.2-1.src.rpm

To try it out on FC4 with all updates applied or rawhide simply do:
rpmbuild --rebuild fuse-2.4.1-3.src.rpm
sudo rpm -ivh rpmbuild/RPMS/i386/fuse-2.4.1-3.i386.rpm rpmbuild/RPMS/i386/fuse-libs-2.4.1-3.i386.rpm rpmbuild/RPMS/i386/fuse-devel-2.4.1-3.i386.rpm
rpmbuild --rebuild fuse-sshfs-1.2-1.src.rpm
rpm --rebuild rpmbuild/RPMS/i386/fuse-sshfs-1.2-2.i386.rpm
sudo rpm -ivh rpmbuild/RPMS/i386/fuse-sshfs-1.2-2.i386.rpm
sudo /usr/sbin/groupadd -a -G ${USER}
ssh localhost
mkdir fusetest
sshfs foo: fusetest/
ls fusetest/

Where foo is the hostname of a machine you normally can connect to via ssh.
-- 
Thorsten Leemhuis <fedora at leemhuis.info>