su is the best. I mean, i should be using the admin (root) password for admin things, not the user password of user who is already logged in. And there needs to be a root service already running to make user have root previlages which is dumb imo. Sudo vulnerability could cause previlage escalation but if there is no root process managing this, then it can’t leak the root access. Only kernel security issue(or other root processes) will leak root access if that was the case, which i think is better.
The permission to do admin things is given by the root user, to your account. So you have to verify your identity by entering your password.
Isn’t that how it is? I though that was analogous to how almost everything worked IRL. Whether withdrawing funds from a bank or engaging government services, you prove your identity as a customer/citizen to get the relevant services. At no point do you login to bank or government computers with full privileges.
If you own your own bank, then i think you login as the one with full previlages. Yes when doing administrator things, you have to use sudo. The problem with root with sudo is, you authenticate as a user, then gain full permission from root, i.e analogous to login in to bank with full previlages.
As a person who need to run sudo command its better to just verify yourself as root user to gain “full access”. I’m not saying about partial previlages. That is i just need a script which is just su -c with environment variables being copied
I’m surprised they would implement having just run0 effectively log you in as root. For the super security conscious constrictions of the command versus sudo, it would seem that the very notion of elevating your privilege beyond the single command to be carried out, would be anathema to the whole goal of this new command. Evidently not, but it’s surprising to me.
I’m going to continue to keep avoiding Poettering software for as long as he continues to act like a jackass. Even his commit messages are dripping with condescension.
Users were complaining that their terminal transparency was being broken by the nspawn container and that the colour for other applications like tmux were being affected by it. For example tmux was appearing in the same navy blue in the terminal emulator instead of its usual green.
Idk he’s just a hot take merchant basically. He has a particular hate-boner for distros that don’t use systemd as the default init system like void and gentoo (usually these are troll tweets as opposed to commit messages though).
Idk he’s just a hot take merchant basically. He has a particular hate-boner for distros that don’t use systemd as the default init system like void and gentoo (usually these are troll tweets as opposed to commit messages though).
shut up, wtf that has todo with the commit, people who don’t use systemd it’s not going to complain about the color of something that they don’t use
My complaint was mostly targeting the big picture of everything living in /bin/
I inferred the ‘user 0’ thing to their credit like you, it just still felt really strange as numerals are kind of a no no when programming – you can’t begin variable and other names with them and I guess having them as a suffix feels strange too as it’s not common practice.
It will definitely be the only utility I recall that uses a numeral.
To me the whole numeral systems are archaic, User ID numbers don’t line up when transferring data from hard drives from another machine eg 1000-1005.
The numeral permission system is archaic and requires explicit knowledge to know the difference between a 7 6 and 4. In GUI Immutability is separate when it should be more integrated as a file control. The octal permissions are from another decade and modern platforms have permissions on whether a executible can access the internet, access input devices like camera or microphone, or sensitive data like contacts, pictures, etc…
I think file tagging should be greatly expanded, IDv3 meta data for example was a workaround for the limitations and the core filesystem should have robust enough tagging to make it unnecessary.
I’ll be controversial now – eliminate the . prefix to hide files. Yes I know it had been this way for decades and was grandfathered in as a feature after a bug, that should have been in the filesystem properties like chattr +I and you shouldn’t need .hidden indexes to hide files just like windows and osx litters zip files with MDF or inf or whatever (memory is fuzzy from non use).
Some people say “4 character” limit, that needs to go too – FHS naming structure is confusing and not self evident what it does to people trying to learn who already have IT training. /etc/ having 2 or more bins /bin vs /usr/bin – ‘what does usr mean the new it ponders’ ‘oh it must mean ‘user’ I guess’. – weird stuff like that.
To systemd credit they have no problem being controversial and relentlessly persuing their vision in a practical way, hell I use their stuff hapilly.
I just feel like the run0 thing is a band aid on bigger problems, and AI critique would be very fascinating to make these human interfaces you know… more for us humans :P
If not systemd, maybe the rust people or someone else will be baller enough to try to tackle these funny ackward quirks that have accumulated over the years and straighten it all out.
provide about 50%–80% of what you want from an operating system
one expects that if the 50% functionality Unix and C support is satisfactory, they will start to appear everywhere.
Unix and C are the ultimate computer viruses.
users have already been conditioned to accept worse than the right thing.
It’s probably possible to make several programs with “50% functionality” in the time it takes to make one program with 100% functionality. Having more programs that are suitable for a majority of relevant applications is probably better than having one program that is suitable for all relevant applications, since having more programs will probably enable a larger variety of problems to be solved, and people often have to solve many different types of problems in their life.
The resources I linked are descriptive and not prescriptive, but in my experience they are suitable to depend upon as a reliable baseline, which makes meeting client requirements with software engineering easier.
Speaking of doas, is there any advantage of using it when… sudo is still available to be used? I agree that most of the stuff we require to use doesn’t need all the options sudo as, but if it is for the sake of security, maintenance, and stability… is there any reason to use doas ON TOP of the already setup sudo or su? In the past, I even tried to just apply a simple alias to replace sudo with doas, but numerous scripts and programs when trying to request explicit super-user permissions, just didn’t know what to do with doas as expected, so this ain’t it.
I agree that most of the stuff we require to use doesn’t need all the options sudo as
Main reason of using doas
but numerous scripts and programs when trying to request explicit super-user permissions, just didn’t know what to do with doas as expected
I’ve only found one software like that and it’s tipi, and it’s kinda dumb for a software to require such a easily replacable software. Also how openbsd users are supposed to do ? Having both doas and sudo on their machine which is unnecessary bloat ?
Yeah I mean at that point it’s redundant because you might as well type su -c “some command here”. On the other hand having such alias does no harm if you’re already using systemd.
I might try run0 for fun, but I don’t think it’ll replace sudo any time soon.
The biggest issue I see is run0 purposely not copying any environment variables except for TERM.
You’d have to specify which editor to use, the current directory, stuff like PATH and HOME every time you run a command.
I'm not a fan of the idea at all, but come on, it can't really be that bad. There's got to be somewhere you can tell it what environment variables to use. Probably something like run0 systemd-edit /usr/system/systemd/systemrun/run0-environment --system-default=system
Maybe, but now I still need to remember the alias or distribute it to any machine I’m working on.
Not that difficult if you have everything managed with Ansible or similar anyways, but lots of people likely don’t have that setup.
sudo had several severe security bugs caused by copying env variables so I’m not surprised run0 isn’t doing much of that. I’ve had to help a whole bunch of people fix the permissions/ownership on their Jo. E directory after running sudo so I can even see the point of jot copying $HOME by default.
I don’t think it’ll replace sudo necessarily, or doas would’ve done that already. It’s still useful as a shorthand for systemd-run and in some locked down system configurations I can see it being useful (i.e. when minimising the amount of SUID binaries). Maybe some elaborate enterprise setups will switch to it for security reasons, especially if they’re already leveraging PolKit heavily.
I will use it. I don’t care what others think. People can use su, sudo, doas, run0 by their choice, and I don’t see why we need a common opinion about it.
A lot of people are afraid of systemd expanding because systemd handles a lot of stuff, so distros are likely to support it rather than the mishmash of tools they personally prefer. It all started with the System-V/Upstart replacement and now very few distros have the patience to customise and roll out the 90s style service management anymore. Their preferences used to align with the mainstream, but no longer do these days, and that causes friction.
This process pushes people who prefer old tools to fringe distros, and newer software is less likely to work on their setups. They’re still free to use whatever system they like, of course, but the burden for developing and maintaining daemon management scripts is now on their fringe distro or themselves if their distro doesn’t have anything yet. I’d find that pretty annoying too, especially with how convoluted many older system management scripts are and how many moving parts are typically involved. Plus, some stuff like socket activation can’t even be done with some of the older init systems so people have to find alternatives.
I doubt anyone reeling against run0 was ever going to consider it anyway.
As it is running sudo with a long process is annoying missing and having to reenter my password or missing and the process timing out if I go afk to wait, I can’t imagine having to type my password every few moments when I run an upgrade. Surely this is not the pitch. This is already looking dead in the water if so, and god help me if I have to remember to type run0.
run0 is just an alias for a part of systemd, so installing doas too would be useless bloat. Another thing to note is that doas is just smaller sudo, you still wouldn’t use 99 % of its features.
edit: also from my totally surface level understanding both sudo and doas “elevate your privileges” which is supposedly unnecessary attack surface. run0 does it in a better way which I do not understand.
also from my totally surface level understanding both sudo and doas “elevate your privileges” which is supposedly unnecessary attack surface. run0 does it in a better way which I do not understand.
sudo and doasare setuid binaries, a special privileged bit to tell the kernel that this binary is not run as the user starting it, but as the owner. A lot of care has to be incorporated into these to make sure you don’t escalate your privileges as the default interface is very limited, being a single bit.
Another issue with this approach is that since you’re running this from your shell, the process will by default inherit all environment variables, which can be convenient, but also annoying (since a privileged process might write into your $HOME) or upright dangerous.
run0doesn’t use that mechanism. systemd is, being a service manager at its core, something launching binaries in specialized environments, e.g. it will start an nginx process under the nginx user with a private tmp, protecting the system from writes by that service, maybe restrict it to a given address family etc. So the infrastructure to launch processes – even for users via systemd-run– is already there. run0 just goes one step further and implements an interface to request to start elevated (or rather with permissions different from their own) processes from a user’s shell.
Classic solutions do it like this:
user starts binary with setuid (let’s say sudo) that runs with root (because that’s the owner of the binary) privileges in their shell. Since this is a child process of their shell, it inherits all environment variables by default.
sudochecks /etc/sudoers if that user is authorized to perform the requested action and either denies the request, performs it or asks for authentication.
a new process is spawned from it, again inheriting the environment variables that were not cleaned, as you can’t get rid of variables by forking (this is often an issue if you have services that have their secrets configured via environment variables)
With run0:
user starts run0 binary as a user process. This process inherits the environment variables.
run0 forwards the user’s request via interface to the running systemd process (pid 1 I guess). That process however does not inherit any variables by default, since it was started outside the user’s shell.
systemd checks if the user who started the run0 binary is allowed to perform the requested operation and again, either denies the request, performs it or asks for authentication.
a new process is spawned from it, but it will only receive the environment variables that were explicitly requested as there’s no inheritance.
At least that’s my understanding, I haven’t looked too much into it or used it yet.
the pid1 part is wrong, only the systemd-init run in pid1, in it’s own process, own binary etc, it’s sole purpose is being an init system, after that it start the rest of the system, including the others systemd binaries
the rest is perfect thanks!, in the lennart he made a comparation with ssh were you “forward the commad to run as root”, i think it’s a good analogy
. run0 does it in a better way which I do not understand.
it does that in a “ssh like” that i read in the blog, they foward your commands, they don’t elevate your user, they also use polkit for security intead of sudoers
The original problem was to automagically prompt the user for password, if he tried to run some systemd executable without the wheel privileges. At some point they decided to reuse the code for [a command that allows you to run stuff as root] replacement because sudo is too bloated and vulnerable.