It Must Be Time for Tea

Friday September 25, 2009

Progress with SCM Mounts

I've been busy implementing a workaround to the sshd privileges issue that I mentioned a couple months ago. Unfortunately, this has meant some delays in my OSCON trip report, but I hope to post the next installment of that sometime in the next week.

Besides implementing the actual workaround, I've been beefing up the scripts that we use for setting up a test environment. Even though we have a backup production system that I could use for testing, it's safer to test a change of this size on a separate system. I sleep a lot better knowing that if I break something during development, I definitely won't inconvenience users.

I've also been learning about the privilege-management facilities that are available in (Open)Solaris. We had some problems finding a concise but sufficiently detailed writeup of how the mount/unmount privileges work. While the information is present in the umount(2) man page, a much clearer explanation is given in the output from "ppriv -lv".