Re: [tlug] join /tmp and /var

[Martin Baehr <mbaehr@example.com>]

On Thu, Jun 26, 2003 at 12:27:26PM +0900, Joe Larabell wrote:
> > again, what would you gain by having a seperate /tmp?
> > /tmp is hardly needed for critical operation.
> Not entirely true. A lot of programs (editors, shells, etc) open up some
> kind of file in /tmp at start-up. 
> You might be surprised how many vital programs rely on /tmp. If you're in
> a GUI environment at the time, you can expect your window manager to bite
> the dust really quick.

with critical i meant ONLY things that prevent you from loggin into your
machine and fixing the problem. everything else is NOT critical.
and you don't need a gui to do that. (if you can't fix that problem
without a gui, chances are you can't fix the problem at all anyways)

> If the attack involves the creation of lots and lots of log entries, it's
> the root user doing the writing to the 5% reserve is useless.

true, but again, a seperate /tmp does not help you here.

> But the read-only aspect is one I hadn't really thought of. Mostly because
> I always thought *nix systems didn't run so happily if the system services
> and the kernel didn't have rw access to the whole file system.

right, it does take some work to get things to get a readonly system
running (i see discussions to that nature popping up on the debian lists
from time to time.)

> I believe you can also put /tmp in the swap area (or is it the other way
> 'round ;-).

i haven't heard of that one, interresting idea,
or maybe are you thinking of putting /tmp on a ramdisk?

greetings, martin.
-- 
Pike Conference 2003 - Sep 25-27  -  http://pike.ida.liu.se/conferences/2003/
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interested in doing pike programming, sTeam/caudium/pike/roxen training,      
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