F11 httpd - non-root "service httpd status" reports wrong

[shmuel siegel]

Jason Farrell wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 11:21 AM, G.Wolfe
> Woodbury<ggw at wolves.durham.nc.us> wrote:
>   
>> F11+updates doing a "service httpd status" reports that the subsystem is
>> locked but httpd dead.  Examination of ps output shows the httpd processes,
>> and pidof reports them.  Prepending sudo to the service command does things
>> right.
>>
>> Not sure why the sudo makes a difference, but it seems to me that it
>> shouldn't require root privleges to simply inquire for the status of
>> something.
>>     
>
> That would be because the pidfile is located in /var/run/httpd vs
> /var/run (as in rhel), and is not readable by nonroot:
> drwx------. 2 root root 4096 2009-09-02 16:04 /var/run/httpd
>
> Not really a bug since regular users don't need to be querying service
> status, and httpd isn't singled out.
>
>   
As pointed out by others, it is a bug since it is saying something that 
is wrong.
But I would argue even further:
    1) The information should be available to the normal user - just 
like yum list and rpm -q
    2) What have you gained by hiding the info that can be found by os
    3) We want to minimize the need for privilege escalation, not maximize