[email protected] wrote:
good evening,
i stumbled over some funny issue when trying windirstat (like KDirStat) with wine.
after running that tool for a while my system rebooted. i could reproduce this with every run.
after some deep investigation (i thought i had stability issues with my system and spent more than an hour on this) i found out, that the reboot is being triggered by iTCO_wdt ( /dev/watchdog )
this is how to reproduce:
- be root
- cat /dev/watchdog or dd if=/dev/watchdog of=/dev/zero bs=1 count=1 or .....
- wait one minute........
*reboot*!
i have heard 2 opinions for now (contacted the author and also discussed on wine-devel ) that this should be expected behaviour.
Yes, it is. It's a watchdog device, it's meant to reboot the machine if
whatever task is poking the watchdog dies.
being sysadmin quite a while, i cannot believe that (accidentally) reading a device file (being root or not - what does that matter) triggers a system reboot.
ok - when i`m root , i shouldn`t do stupid things and be careful, but i thought reading/crawling trough a filesystem (r/o, btw.) with some tool which is built to do exactly this wasn`t so stupid - even from within wine.
I would say that running a Windows tool that opens up and reads random
files, on the /dev directory tree, as root, probably does qualify as
"stupid". I'd say running pretty much anything through Wine as root is
not a good idea, a Windows app could hose the system without even
meaning to through exactly such things.
think of an admin writing a quick&dirty script for intrusion detection (find / -exec md5sum {} \; >/tmp/need-no-tripwire) and forgetting to exclude /dev, /sys or /proc appropriately......
think of someone exporting "/" via samba (readonly) and then navigating trough the /dev directory....
stupid?
i don`t think so.....i have seen worse things...... :)
should someone get punished by an accidental system reboot and should he need to spend his time on this to investigate why this happens?
i`d wish there would be some fence around this or iTCO_wdt /dev/watchdog not being active after a default desktop installation.
There is.. it's called "root privileges".
i`d be interested if i`m the only one who thinks this is strange/dangerous behaviour.
regards
roland
--
Robert Hancock Saskatoon, SK, Canada
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Home Page: http://www.roberthancock.com/
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