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Bug 192153

Summary: rpm escapes --root if it disappears
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Reporter: Mike McLean <mikem>
Component: rpmAssignee: Panu Matilainen <pmatilai>
Status: CLOSED WONTFIX QA Contact:
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: 4.0CC: dgregor, mikeb, praiskup, wtogami
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OS: Linux   
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Last Closed: 2012-06-20 13:21:16 UTC Type: ---
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Description Flags
strace of rpm showing this issue none

Description Mike McLean 2006-05-17 22:05:04 UTC 
If you use rpm --root <chroot> to install packages for a chroot and the chroot
disappears while rpm is installing, it falls back to installing package content
outside of the chroot. This can really hose your system.

The version of rpm I am using is the one from U3: rpm-4.3.3-13_nonptl

To replicate this in a safe way, I've done the following:
1) create a harmless set of test packages to install
2) created a base chroot to install them in
3) install the test packages in the chroot
4) while the test packages are installing, delete the chroot
5) verify that contest from the test packages has been installed outside of the
chroot

I've written a script that goes through these steps: ~mikem/rpm-chroot.sh
The script has an strace option for running rpm through strace
For step 4, I recommend using ~mikem/rmtree

I will post some strace output shortly
Comment 1 Mike McLean 2006-05-17 22:11:49 UTC 
Created attachment 129369 [details]
strace of rpm showing this issue

It looks like rpm may simply be ignoring the error code from a failed chroot:

chdir("/")				= 0
chroot("/var/lib/mock//test/")		= -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)

time(NULL)				= 1147903876
open("/var/tmp/rpm-tmp.61061", O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC|O_EXCL, 0666) = 8
Comment 2 Mike McLean 2006-10-26 23:29:12 UTC 
in psm.c, chroot is called three times:
in runScript, the return code is not checked
in rpmpsmStage (two instances), the return code of the chroot is returned from
the function, but I'm not sure how it is handled further up the line

in transaction.c, chroot is called twice in the function rpmtsRun. The return
code is not checked.
Comment 3 Warren Togami 2006-10-27 01:47:24 UTC 
jkeating mentioned that brew is using a patched rpm that avoids this problem. 
Is this true?
Comment 4 Mike McLean 2006-10-27 02:01:36 UTC 
No, brew is not using a patched rpm. Once we understood the nature of the
problem, we were able to avoid triggering the bug.
Comment 5 Jeff Johnson 2006-10-27 14:48:09 UTC 
In most cases, there's little risk, as chroot is root-only, the build tree is owned by root.root and so cannot 
be removed, and the outer file system is owned root.root, etc.

But yes, the chroot return code needs to be checked.
Comment 6 Jiri Pallich 2012-06-20 13:21:16 UTC 
Thank you for submitting this issue for consideration in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The release for which you requested us to review is now End of Life. 
Please See https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata/

If you would like Red Hat to re-consider your feature request for an active release, please re-open the request via appropriate support channels and provide additional supporting details about the importance of this issue.