Re: jail sockstat shows gdnc, gdomap, casperd as enabled

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 3 Jun 2014, at 12:01, David Chisnall <theraven@sucs.org> wrote:

> Forwarding this from the freebsd-current list:
> 
> Begin forwarded message:
> 
>> I had installed mail/gnumail for testing and figuring out whether I wanted
>> to use the thing. It had some GUI display + flickering problems, so I never
>> really got around to trying it. This program however, had installed a whole
>> slew of GNUstep-* ports - I decided to just get rid of the damned thing and
>> removed all those dependent binaries. The problem cleared up on host and in
>> the jails.
>> 
>> It seems GNUstep took the liberty of starting up as several threads on host
>> as well, and I assume it probably has a "listen on all IPs" sort of like
>> ntpd does.
>> 
>> A caveat for future testers of mail/gnumail: It's a nasty little SOB!
> 
> The original complaint was that GNUstep applications start gdnc and gdomap, 
> which by default bind to a public IP.  This is almost certainly not a sane 
> default anymore, as very few users actually want to use gdnc / gdomap over 
> the network.  It would probably be better if we checked for a user default 
> setting and only enabled the network mode if the user has explicitly asked 
> for it.


Firstly, apps only start the daemons if/when they need to use them... so 
whether they are started has to do with the APIs the developer decides the APP 
requires in order to implement the functionality they want to deliver to the 
end users.

I'm pretty certain gdnc uses unix domain sockets by default ... no public IP 
involved unless the application actually requests it (you can request different 
types of distributed notification center and the default is user/host local).
In turn the library launches different versions of gdnc for different 
notification centers ... one for host/user local notifications, one for host 
local but multi-user, and one for network wide ... on demand when the app tries 
to use a particular notification center.
If that's not working as it should be, it's a bug (however I see nothing above 
to actually indicate it's doing anything at all in this case).

The gdomap daemon is not used at all unless the application requests it ... and 
for host/user local distributed objects it won't be launched.  The host/user 
local distributed objects operates via unix domain sockets and uses a different 
nameserver mechanism.
So if it's launched by an app it's because that app is trying to do some DO 
which is not host/user local.

In other words, the current behavior is to already only use a public address 
when the user (ie the app developer) explicitly requests it.

So I don't think there's any sense calling for a user default to change the 
default behavior ... when the default behavior already makes sense.
However, there could well be a case for spotting some situation where things 
are not working as expected and fixing any bug, or a case to pester the 
maintainer of some app which isn't behaving reasonably (for instance I have no 
idea why GNUmail would start gdomap ... if it does).