[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#534976: consolekit: does not preserve state during daemon restarts

[Francesco Poli (t1000)]

Package: consolekit
Version: 0.3.0-2
Severity: important

Hi!

As explained in bug #527846 (see its complete log, for more context),
if a security update on one of the dependencies creates the *need*
to restart console-kit-daemon, I find myself with the following
dilemma:

  (a) I kill the daemon and wait for D-Bus to start it again

  (b) I stay with the insecure daemon running

  (c) I reboot the entire system

Since there's apparently no way to restart the daemon while
preserving its state, if I choose (a), I loose all registered sessions
and could encounter awkward side-effects.

On the other hand, (b) is not a viable option, when security is
involved.

Finally, (c) is simply *unacceptable*, especially for a production
box where more than one user may be using the system, e.g. via SSH.
For instance, think of a scientific computation workstation where users
start long-running number crunching programs.
The *only* case where I can live with the need to reboot the whole
system is when the kernel is updated for security reasons.


I really think that a daemon that cannot be safely restarted without
unexpected consequences is badly designed.
There *must* be a safe way to restart the daemon without unintended
weird behaviors.
Hence the severity of this bug is at least "important" (if not higher).

I strongly recommend fixing this design flaw.

I don't know exactly how this could be done: maybe there should
be a signal (e.g.: SIGHUP, or even SIGTERM) that forces the daemon to
save its state somewhere on the filesystem (probably somewhere
under /var/lib , if I understand the FHS correctly), so that the state
can be restored as soon as the daemon is started again.

Another strategy could be that the daemon always keeps its state on the
filesystem, and only wipes it out when it has to.  This way, stop/start
cycles for the daemon would not have a strong impact on the system
behavior.

There are probably better solutions...

Please fix this issue, and/or forward the bug report to upstream, as
appropriate.
Thanks in advance.





-- System Information:
Debian Release: squeeze/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (800, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.26-2-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages consolekit depends on:
ii  dbus                   1.2.12-1          simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libc6                  2.9-12            GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libck-connector0       0.3.0-2           ConsoleKit libraries
ii  libdbus-1-3            1.2.12-1          simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libdbus-glib-1-2       0.80-4            simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libglib2.0-0           2.20.1-2          The GLib library of C routines
ii  libx11-6               2:1.2.1-1         X11 client-side library
ii  zlib1g                 1:1.2.3.3.dfsg-13 compression library - runtime

Versions of packages consolekit recommends:
ii  libpam-ck-connector           0.3.0-2    ConsoleKit PAM module

consolekit suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information