Re: troubles chrooting oidentd

[Bob Proulx]

Brian Kreulen wrote:
> Hello all, I'm in the process of creating a chroot jail for oidentd on
> my Gentoo box, but I'm running into some problems. oidentd runs find
> just by itself, but it refuses to  run in the chrooted environment.

I am not familiar with oidentd.  Google found it here:

  http://dev.ojnk.net/stuff/oidentd.readme

The author suggests contacting him with "suggestions, questions,
comments, bug reports, et cetera" which sounds like good advice for
the problem you are now seeing.  I am sure the author would have
better insight than us over here on the bug-coreutils list as to why
oidentd is not working in your chroot.  (Of course we are really good
over here and so the word gets around that we can solve all
problems. [chuckle, chuckle] :-)

> Here's what I've done: 

All of those things that you did sound like reasonable things to me to
set up a chroot'd environment.

> As soon as I add -u1002 -g1002, nothing happens. No output, no
> errors, just nothing.

One thing that I might suggest is checking that it can write to log
files as the new user.  Frequently when programs can't open their log
file they will exit and without any place to log errors to their
screams can't be heard.  I would double check that it really can log
to its log files as the new user.  Check whether it is using syslog or
handling error logging itself.

Make sure its log directory and any existing files there are writable
by the user you are creating for it.  If there are logfile options
then you might try pointing the log file at /tmp/logfile for debugging
purposes.  This is a frequent source of errors when attempting to set
up a chroot for a daemon program.

Good luck!

Bob

> Hello all, I'm in the process of creating a chroot jail for oidentd on
> my Gentoo box, but I'm running into some problems. oidentd runs find
> just by itself, but it refuses to  run in the chrooted environment.
> Here's what I've done:
>
> File Structure: 
> /path_to_chroot_home/ 
>    bin 
>    dev 
>    etc 
>    lib 
>    tmp 
>    usr 
>       sbin 
>    var 
>       run 
> 
> The chrooted etc contains: 
>    group passwd shadow ld.so.cache (regenerated in the 
> environment) 
> 
> /usr/sbin contains the oidentd executable. 
> 
> dev contains: 
> crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1,   3 Sep  2 15:00 null 
> crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1,   5 Sep  2 18:05 zero 
> 
> lib contains all the library files which were outputted by 'ldd
> /usr/sbin/oidentd' and 'lsof | grep  oidentd', while oidentd was running
> of course. 
> 
> I realize I don't have syslogging setup, but that doesn't matter,
> because I'm running oidentd with the -S and -q flags, which suppress
> logging. I'll turn them on later... 
> 
> oidentd DOES run fine in the chrooted environment without any flags. But
> of course it runs as root, which is completely undesirable. As soon as I
> add -u1002 -g1002, nothing happens. No output, no errors, just nothing.
> a 'ps -ef | grep oidentd' shows nothing. 
> 
> My chrooted /etc/passwd and /etc/group contain the appropriate user and
> group, so there should be no problem. What am I missing? Do I have to
> regenerate the passwd database somehow? 
> 
> I know I'm missing something small and stupid, but all my googling says
> that it should be up and running. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
> -- 
> Brian Kreulen
> 
> "We shall not cease from exploration
> And the end of all our exploring
> Will be to arrive where we started
> And know the place for the first time"
> 
> --T.S. Eliot