Xymon Mailing List Archive search

Recommendations for how I should set maint-senders ?

list Henrik Størner
Mon, 10 Mar 2014 10:42:27 +0100
Message-Id: <user-dd5fb0e63950@xymon.invalid>

Den 2014-03-06 21:44, John Thurston skrev:
the --maint-senders option for xymond is explained as:
Controls which hosts may send maintenance commands to xymond.
Maintenance commands are the "enable", "disable", "ack" and "notes"
commands. Format of this option is as for the --status-senders
option. It is strongly recommended that you use this to restrict
access to these commands, so that monitoring of a host cannot be
disabled by a rogue user - e.g. to hide a system compromise from the
monitoring system.
But while exploring some unexpected client behavior today, it appears
that --maint-senders is only enforced for hosts in hosts.cfg which are
defined with explicit addresses.

On line 71 of lib/ipaccess.c I found this:
if (strcmp(targetip, "0.0.0.0") == 0) return 1; /* DHCP hosts can report from any address */
It looks like regardless of how I set --maint-senders, anyone can
send a 'disable' message for any host defined with 0.0.0.0   Since 90%
of my 500 hosts are dynamically defined in hosts.cfg, it feels like
trying to clamp down --maint-senders is kind of pointless for me.
This is a bug. In most cases, the IP access check with the --maint-senders option will not hit this piece of the code in lib/ipaccess.c (because the 'targetip' parameter is NULL). But exactly for the enable/disable case, it is set to the IP from hosts.cfg.

The idea behind this is to permit a host to send a "disable" status for itself, e.g. when shutting down a service for maintenance.

I'll get a fix for this into 4.3.18.


Regards,
Henrik