Skip to content
Commit f7c77676 authored by Jamey Sharp's avatar Jamey Sharp
Browse files

nixos/nscd: only drop privs after nss module init

NixOS usually needs nscd just to have a single place where
LD_LIBRARY_PATH can be set to include all NSS modules, but nscd is also
useful if some of the NSS modules need to read files which are only
accessible by root.

For example, nixos/modules/config/ldap.nix needs this when
  users.ldap.enable = true;
  users.ldap.daemon.enable = false;
and users.ldap.bind.passwordFile exists. In that case, the module
creates an /etc/ldap.conf which is only readable by root, but which the
NSS module needs to read in order to find out what LDAP server to
connect to and with what credentials.

If nscd is started as root and configured with the server-user option in
nscd.conf, then it gives each NSS module the opportunity to initialize
itself before dropping privileges. The initialization happens in the
glibc-internal __nss_disable_nscd function, which pre-loads all the
configured NSS modules for passwd, group, hosts, and services (but not
netgroup for some reason?) and, for each loaded module, calls an init
function if one is defined. After that finishes, nscd's main() calls
nscd_init() which ends by calling finish_drop_privileges().

There are provisions in systemd for using DynamicUser with a service
which needs to drop privileges itself, so this patch does that.
parent c38fa997
0% or .
You are about to add 0 people to the discussion. Proceed with caution.
Finish editing this message first!
Please register or to comment