[Gllug] HAL and udev

[Mike Brodbelt]

Nix wrote:
> On Fri, 04 Aug 2006, Mike Brodbelt yowled:

> One out-of-date paper. But, hey, as of HAL 0.5.8 it dpeends on a new
> PolicyKit component which is security-critical, contains numerous severe
> bugs (like not dropping privileges when it should and ignoring its
> don't- run-as-root option), is intended for sysadmins to customize, and
> has absolutely no documentation.
> 
> Wonderful, isn't it :(

Oh dear. There's some slides I found from a recent talk at OLS where
they're talking about giving it capabilities like FormatDisk().
Considering what a hairy black box the whole thing is, that's enough to
give me chills. I can see why the architecture might actually be useful,
but these sorts of things really need far more transparency. It also
includes my GNOME pet hate - XML configuration files.

> Well, a good start is to make sure that HAL is listening on the same
> socket that udev is sending on. It listens on an AF_UNIX socket in the
> abstract socket namespace, so:
> 
> hades:/etc/udev/rules.d# grep hal /etc/udev/rules.d/*
> /etc/udev/rules.d/30-hal.rules:RUN+="socket:/org/freedesktop/hal/udev_event"
> 
> .. i.e., udev is sending to /org/freedesktop/hal/udev_event in the abstract
> namespace...
> 
> hades:/etc/udev/rules.d# netstat -ap | grep hal
> [...]
> unix  2      [ ]         DGRAM                    1920   695/hald            @/org/freedesktop/hal/udev_event
>

That was most helpful - thanks. Problem turned out to be that some time
ago I created some custom udev rules, but the udev syntax has since
changed, and they'd broken, and prevented the distribution installed
rule that's supposed to forward events to HAL from working.

Mike
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