Comment 2 for bug 734179

Revision history for this message
Florian Forster (octo) wrote : Re: [collectd] [Bug 734179] collectd runs as root unnecessarily

Hi Andrew and Sebastian,

On Sun, Mar 13, 2011 at 02:39:06PM +0100, Sebastian Harl wrote:
> With this E-mail, I'm also submitting this as wishlist bug report to
> the Debian BTS and I'm going to fix it in my next upload.

I would have liked to answer to that bug as well, but couldn't find it
on bugs.debian.org. Am I missing something?

On Sun, Mar 13, 2011 at 07:04:39AM -0000, Andrew Yates wrote:
> (It might also be a good idea to run collectd as an unprivileged user
> by default. A quick test suggests that of the default plugins only
> 'df' may require root privileges.)

In the vast majority of cases, the "df" plugin doesn't need privileges.
The only problematic case I can think of right now is if some file
system is mounted at "/secret/foo" and the unprivileged user isn't
allowed to read "/secret".

Plugins which do require privileges can be found in the collectd wiki in
the "Plugins requiring privileges" category [0].

Regards,
—octo

[0] <http://collectd.org/wiki/index.php/Category:Plugins_requiring_privileges>
--
Florian octo Forster
Hacker in training
GnuPG: 0x0C705A15
http://octo.it/