Re: (chroot tools)

[Nico Kadel-G. <nk...@gm...>]

On Wed, Nov 18, 2015 at 3:06 PM, Derek Martin <co...@pi...> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 18, 2015 at 06:06:59AM -0500, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
>> I published some tools to set these up some time ago, including an
>> enhanced "mkchroot.sh" tool and and a "mkchroot-passwd.sh" tool for
>> just this sort of setup at https://github.com/nkadel/rssh-chroot-tools
>>
>> If anyone wants to take on real maintenance for rssh, I'd love to
>> see those tools lintegrated.
>
> The reason I never integrated any such tools is because they are
> inherently platform-specific, and/or environment-specific.  Your tools
> appear to be specific to red hat distros which are installed with
> default installs, but they probably won't work on customized installs,
> or any number of other distros of varying ages, and almost certainly
> won't work on any other flavor of Unix--all of which are (at least in
> theory) supported by RSSH.  The problem could be addressed with, say,
> a heirarchical contrib directory of tools which are careful to take
> lots of parameters for flexibility; but I didn't want to maintain
> that, especially since I can't test it (and wouldn't want to, even if
> I could).  It could, *in theory*, also be addressed by a single set of
> tools that knows what to do for all the various platforms and takes
> all relevant paths as options... but in my mind such a tool would be
> so unweildy to use that you'd be better off doing it by hand anyway.
> ;)

I hope you didn't mind my posting the link!

Please reconsider this policy. I admit I don't currently maintain any
real UNIX systems. (Not that I haven't, my first UNIX was BSD 4.2!)
The tools likely to be created when "doing it by hand anyway" are
likely to be unwieldy and undocumented. and to fail flat-out fail for
reasons that new engineers may be unaware of.

I'm happy to maintain these for now: it just seems logical to bundle
them with rssh, for discoverability by new administrators, for
availability with Fedora and Debian, where the software is avaialble
bundled up.

> Frankly, I don't think integration of such tools into the code base
> makes sense, for those reasons.  It seems like a separate,
> complementary software project to me.

That's what a "contribs" directory would be ideal for. I agree that it
is complementary, but rssh is fairly useless without chroot cage
building tools, and I've seen the mangled mash that new engineers come
up when first confronted with the problem. Symlinks, hardlinked
together and symlinks replaced with hardlinks and separate copies: it
wasn't petty.....