[collectd] Symlinks to Plugins

Ville Koskela vkoskela at groupon.com
Mon Sep 29 19:05:32 CEST 2014


Thanks Pavel!

On Sun, Sep 28, 2014 at 9:47 AM, Pavel V. <pavel2000 at ngs.ru> wrote:

>
> > Hi,
>
>
> > Our deployment system which makes extensive use of symlinks. However, it
> seems that plugins cannot be loaded through symlinks.
>
> > Source version 5.4.1; plugin.c; starting at line 970:
> > else if (!S_ISREG (statbuf.st_mode))
> > {
> >   /* don't follow symlinks */
> >   WARNING ("plugin_load: %s is not a regular file.",
> >      filename);
> >   continue;
> > }
> > I have been unable to find an explanation in the FAQ or through Google
> (seems all/most of the
> > mailing list archives are now indexed). Would someone mind elaborating
> on why symlinks are not followed to load plugins?
>
>
> Hi!
>
> I think what this is additional security measure, proposed by collectd
> developers.
> Collectd is running with root privileges and library loading by symlink
> was considered insecure.
>
> Collect currently has no support for custom plugins, compiled
> independently from collectd (API is
> not considered to be stable, read
> https://collectd.org/wiki/index.php/Plugin_architecture),  and
> packages, provided by OS, contain all plugins, that are available for the
> platform. So mainly there
> are no needs to load plugins by symlink and that was prohibited.
>
> I have no another explanation for this.
> However I also see no similar checks at apache httpd, for example, and
> there are no problems with it.
>
>
>
> --
> Regards,
>  Pavel                          mailto:pavel2000 at ngs.ru
>
>


-- 
*Ville Koskela*
Software Engineer

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