27 May 2006 (Sat)

17:55:06 # Life cowdancer and its limitations. I've been expecting a few design problems with cowdancer; and I was hoping that these problems are going to be minimal that normal package building isn't affected. One thing that cowdancer cannot handle is that because it plays tricks with replacing i-nodes when writing to a file, any application that expects same i-nodes before and after 'open' syscall will fail. Apparently, this is a popular behavior to avoid symlink attacks. So, if an application does lstat, open, fstat, in sequence, and checks the dev/inode number of the lstat/fstat result, the application will be confused when running under cowdancer, which will change the inode number hooking 'open'. For cowdancer with pbuilder, if dpkg/apt and preinst/postinst works, that's fine, and it seems to be functioning; which is good.

Junichi Uekawa

$Id: dancer-diary.el,v 1.90 2006/01/31 11:16:16 dancer Exp $