By default, $PGUSER has permission to unlink $PGLOG. If $PGUSER
replaces $PGLOG with a symbolic link, the server will corrupt the
link-targeted file by appending log messages. Since these scripts open
$PGLOG as root, the attack works regardless of target file ownership.
"make install" does not install these scripts anywhere. Users having
manually installed them in the past should repeat that process to
acquire this fix. Most script users have $PGLOG writable to root only,
located in $PGDATA. Just before updating one of these scripts, such
users should rename $PGLOG to $PGLOG.old. The script will then recreate
$PGLOG with proper ownership.
Reviewed by Peter Eisentraut. Reported by Antoine Scemama.
Security: CVE-2017-12172
The different actions in pg_ctl had different defaults for -w and -W,
mostly for historical reasons. Most users will want the -w behavior, so
make that the default.
Remove the -w option in most example and test code, so avoid confusion
and reduce verbosity. pg_upgrade is not touched, so it can continue to
work with older installations.
Reviewed-by: Beena Emerson <memissemerson@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: Ryan Murphy <ryanfmurphy@gmail.com>
Various example and test code used -m fast explicitly, but since it's
the default, this can be omitted now or should be replaced by a better
example.
pg_upgrade is not touched, so it can continue to operate with older
installations.
Arrange for postmaster child processes to respond to two environment
variables, PG_OOM_ADJUST_FILE and PG_OOM_ADJUST_VALUE, to determine whether
they reset their OOM score adjustments and if so to what. This is superior
to the previous design involving #ifdef's in several ways. The behavior is
now available in a default build, and both ends of the adjustment --- the
original adjustment of the postmaster's level and the subsequent
readjustment by child processes --- can now be controlled in one place,
namely the postmaster launch script. So it's no longer necessary for the
launch script to act on faith that the server was compiled with the
appropriate options. In addition, if someone wants to use an OOM score
other than zero for the child processes, that doesn't take a recompile
anymore; and we no longer have to cater separately to the two different
historical kernel APIs for this adjustment.
Gurjeet Singh, somewhat revised by me
This changes the behavior of the start and stop actions to exit
successfully if the server was already started or stopped.
This changes the default behavior of the start action: Before, if the
server was already running, it would print a message and succeed. Now,
that situation will result in an error. When running in idempotent
mode, no message is printed and pg_ctl exits successfully.
It was considered to just make the idempotent behavior the default and
only option, but pg_upgrade needs the old behavior.
The simplest way to handle this is just to copy-and-paste the relevant
code block in fork_process.c, so that's what I did. (It's possible that
something more complicated would be useful to packagers who want to work
with either the old or the new API; but at this point the number of such
people is rapidly approaching zero, so let's just get the minimal thing
done.) Update relevant documentation as well.
script.
To do this, have pg_ctl pass down its parent shell's PID in an environment
variable PG_GRANDPARENT_PID, and teach CreateLockFile() to disregard that PID
as a false match if it finds it in postmaster.pid. This allows us to cope
with one level of postgres-owned shell process even with pg_ctl in the way,
so it's just as safe as starting the postmaster directly. You still have to
be careful about how you write the initscript though.
Adjust the comments in contrib/start-scripts/ to not deprecate use of
pg_ctl. Also, fix the ROTATELOGS option in the OSX script, which was
indulging in exactly the sort of unsafe coding that renders this fix
pointless :-(. A pipe inside the "sudo" will probably result in more
than one postgres-owned process hanging around.
must be stale. Tweak example startup scripts to not use pg_ctl but launch
the postmaster directly, thereby ensuring that only the postmaster's direct
parent shell will be a postgres-owned process. In combination these should
fix the longstanding problem of the postmaster sometimes refusing to start
during reboot because it thinks the old lockfile is not stale.
Noah Misch