Re: [Mldonkey-users] Calling for technical help : starting mldonkey as a service

[Brett Dikeman]

At 2:54 PM +0100 2/19/03, Sylvain LE GALL wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have go along the path to see if i can find some consistent
> information about running securely mldonkey on my system.

Compile it statically, use the prebuild static binaries, or run ld on 
the mldonkey binary and copy(symlinks will not work) the listed 
libraries.  They almost certainly in turn rely on other libraries, so 
I don't recommend a dynamic binary with a lib dir inside the jail.

Run it in a chroot-jail as a NON-ROOT user.  You need root to make 
the chroot system call, but you MUST NOT run mldonkey as root.  I 
think this means a copy of sudo needs to be inside the jail.  As you 
can see, this gets complicated fast if the daemon can't drop 
permissions on its own.

No options need to be provided on the command line or via environment 
variables(most everything is done from the option files), but all 
directory configuration directives will need to be altered to reflect 
the chroot'd environment(ie, /home/user/mldonkey/incoming is 
basically now /incoming).  You will also have to redirect either 
stdout, stderr, or both to logfiles or /dev/null(I suggest /dev/null.)

I suggest finding an initscript for a daemon that doesn't leave 
lockfiles or PID files around, and modify that; it'll already have 
proven logic for testing if the process exists and such, so 
start/stop/status won't do silly things like launch 2 copies.  Submit 
it to the project for inclusion if you come up with something nice 
and functional; remember to use variables in the script so it's easy 
to customize to someone's particular installation, ie "edit this to 
the directory where your mldonkey binary is" etc.

HTH,
Brett
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