non-root process and PID files

[Miguel Mendez]

Dixitur illum "Dan Langille" <dan at langille.org> scribere...

Hi,

> If a process starts up and does a setuid, should it be writing the 
> PID file before or after the setuid?
> 
> Two methods exists AFAIK:
> 
> 1 - write your PID immediately, and the file is chown root:wheel

OpenBSD seems to favor this approach, if that tells you something.

[...]
-rw-r--r--   1 root  wheel      6 Oct 10 21:17 mountd.pid
-rw-r--r--   1 root  wheel      5 Oct 10 21:17 named.pid
-rw-r--r--   1 root  wheel     20 Oct 12 22:13 nmbd.pid
-rw-r--r--   1 root  wheel      5 Oct 10 21:17 ntpd.pid
-rw-r--r--   1 root  wheel      6 Oct 10 21:17 pflogd.pid
-rw-r--r--   1 root  wheel      5 Oct 11 10:15 rtadvd.pid
-rw-r--r--   1 root  wheel     20 Oct 12 22:13 smbd.pid
-rw-r--r--   1 root  wheel      6 Oct 10 21:17 sshd.pid
-rw-r--r--   1 root  wheel      6 Oct 10 21:17 syslog.pid
[...]

> Of the two, I think #1 is cleaner as it does not require another 
> directory with special permissions.

Agreed.

Cheers,

----
	Miguel Mendez
	http://www.energyhq.es.eu.org