[CVS] pidfile support

[Rob Siemborski]

On Sun, 15 Dec 2002, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:

> 1. There is no support for updating the pidfile. Thus, the lock is acquired
> only after forking, which means we lost the controlling terminal by the time
> we can complain about not being able to acquire a lock, and that we have
> already tried to go daemon and thus whatever is trying to start master is
> NOT told that we failed.

I don't think you can fix this in a perfect way, giving unix locking
semantics (well, atleast fcntl).

This is using the code from the original patch:

http://bugzilla.andrew.cmu.edu/attachment.cgi?id=93&action=view

[A] lock and write pidfile
[A] fork and create [B] (which doesn't hold a lock on the file)
[B] attempt to reacquire lock on pidfile, FAIL since A doesn't have it
[A] exit(success)
[B] exit(failure)

The parent to A thinks we successfully finished, when in reality we've
stepped on our own feet.

I've experementally verified that this is actually a problem in theory
(if not in practice).

I don't think the BSD flock() semantics even help us here (hold lock
across fork() but any close() will get rid of the lock), since then we
have:

[A] lock and write the pidfile
[A] fork and create [B] (which shares the lock with [A])
[A] exit(success), which closes the file descriptor and releases the lock
[C] start a master process, lock and write the pidfile
[B] attempt to reacquire lock, and fail because [C] has the lock

(I'll note that I haven't experementally verified this sequence)

Now we've exited in failure, and not reported so to our parent.

But, I think this might be less of an issue than the first, since master
still starts successfully in the end (though, perhaps with a different
config file?)

I'm willing to listen to suggestions.

> 2. Close on exec is not being set on the pidfile.  Right now, this is not
> a bug.  However, should we forget a close(pidfile) anywhere, it could
> somehow be the part of a bigger security hole...

This is doable I suppose.

-Rob

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Rob Siemborski * Andrew Systems Group * Cyert Hall 207 * 412-268-7456
Research Systems Programmer * /usr/contributed Gatekeeper