[Libguestfs] [PATCH] Fix error launching libguestfs when euid != uid

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 11:44:06AM +0100, Matthew Booth wrote:
> When writing to a RHEV target, virt-v2v launches the libguestfs appliance with
> euid:egid = 36:36, which is required to write to an NFS target using
> root_squash. Since the update to use an febootstrap cached appliance, this
> causes an error on startup as the cached files are owned by root, but the cache
> directory is owned by 36:36. The reason for this is that execve() resets euid
> and egid to uid and gid respectively, so when febootstrap-supermin-helper is
> executed, it runs as root:root. The cache directory, however, is created by
> libguestfs directly without exec()ing another program, so it has the correct
> ownership.
> 
> This patch fixes this issue by setting real uid and gid to euid and egid
> respectively before exec()ing the helper program.

Turns out to be a misfeature of bash, not the exec system call.

I've got a few general comments, but I will try to write an
alternative patch and post that.

My comments are:

(1) Since febootstrap-supermin-helper -f checksum ... doesn't write to
any file nor does it look in the cache directory, that whole call to
popen presumably can stay as it is.  That reduces the complexity of
the patch considerably.  Or am I missing something about that?

(2) posix_spawn(3) is a better replacement for system(3).  If you
*omit* the POSIX_SPAWN_RESETIDS flag then it looks from a casual
reading of the man page that posix_spawn won't try to change the uid
or euid of the child process.

As I said I will try writing an alternate patch.

Rich.

-- 
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