Bug 66834 – baselayout-1.9.4-r{3,4} inittab gives different "single" mode behaviours

• Status: RESOLVED FIXED
• Product: Gentoo Linux

[Description Klaus-J. Wolf 2004-10-08 19:36:09 UTC]

To me, it is unclear whether it's a feature or a bug, but baselayout-1.9.4-r{3,4} give different behaviours for runlevels "S" and "1".

AFAIK, in traditional Linux understanding, "S" and "1" should be equivalent, and according to Gentoo installation documents of 2004.1, both should result in "rc single" be launched.

But in fact, "1" gives us 6 login terminals, while "S" gives us only one, and you don't need a password to get a shell. So we have in fact 8 runlevels, not 7 like being told in working_with_gentoo.txt.

Since this behaviour is quite obvious, but nevertheless undocumented, it may lead to system compromise.

[Comment 1 SpanKY 2004-10-25 07:43:19 UTC]

umm, in order to change runlevels, you'd either have to be root or have access
to the bootloader at boot time

if either of these happen, your system is already compromised, so really this isnt
anything special

[Comment 2 Klaus-J. Wolf 2004-10-25 08:06:42 UTC]

Indeed, it's no remote compromise... But everyone who has access to the machine physically...

[Comment 3 SpanKY 2004-10-31 01:24:31 UTC]

if you have physical access to the machine and the ability to change runlevels, it doesnt matter what the behavior of S and 1 are, a person can trivially compromise the machine with other methods

[Comment 4 Klaus-J. Wolf 2004-10-31 02:41:44 UTC]

What the hell ever you have excuses for, document it.

[Comment 5 SpanKY 2004-10-31 02:53:00 UTC]

why dont we do something constructive and figure out what the behavior is supposed to be before you start acting stupid

[Comment 6 Klaus-J. Wolf 2004-10-31 03:15:06 UTC]

As many people might expect: there should be "1" equivalent to "s". there might be an additional "e(mergency)" which might behave different (starting less services, igoring standard tty settings). most important: it should be documented. Everything is possible, as long as it is documented.

[Comment 7 Martin Schlemmer (RETIRED) 2005-08-04 09:11:04 UTC]

Fixed baselayout trunk and inittab from sysvinit to agree with this.

[Comment 8 Lars Wendler (Polynomial-C) (RETIRED) 2005-08-06 05:27:37 UTC]

Hi,

the fix doesn't work for me. After updating my inittab I get following message
when entering runlevel 1:
INIT: no more processes left in this runlevel

after that the machine hangs and I have to reset the machine in order to get it
working again. I think this is a serious problem as "init s" also doesn't work
as expected (see bug #95876)

Please reopen this bug as it ist still not fixed.

Poly

[Comment 9 Martin Schlemmer (RETIRED) 2005-08-25 04:41:49 UTC]

You need the latest baselayout-1.12.0_pre ...