Subject: Re: What's in my swap
To: Geert Hendrickx <ghen@NetBSD.org>
From: Johnny Billquist <bqt@update.uu.se>
List: current-users
Date: 08/02/2006 14:39:01
Well, what did you expect when you added them to the operator group?
The operator have read access to the raw devices. Security "risk"? You bet!
An operator can read anything on a disk. They need to, in order to make 
a backup!

	Johnny

Geert Hendrickx wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 02, 2006 at 11:23:39AM +0800, Joseph A. Dacuma wrote:
> 
>>>Try this
>>>awk '( $3 == "swap" ) { print $1}' /etc/fstab|xargs cat |strings|more
>>>
>>>
>>>-Ober
>>>
>>>
>>
>>Hi Ober!
>>
>>I temporarily bumped my RAM four times more than the original size on my
>>machine. Ran top saying the system is not swapping yet.
>>
>>Memory: 113M Act, 964K Wired, 41M Exec, 18M File, 1096M Free
>>Swap: 1500M Total, 1500M Free
>>
>>I ran the command above as root and saw a long output. Does this mean
>>that the space dedicated for swap is not flushed out after reboot and
>>what was swapped before remains there until it is overwritten by another
>>instance of "swapping/paging"?
> 
> 
> Indeed.  What you see is what has ever been in swap but has not been
> overwritten yet.  
> 
> What frightened me is that this command worked for my regular non-root user
> as well, because it's in the "operator" group.  I have all console users in
> the operator group so they can use the shutdown(8) command, mount floppy
> and CD-ROM devices, ..., but this now seems to be a security issue.  
> 
> 	Geert

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt@update.uu.se           ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol