Add an alternative restricted service capability

Bug #2051028 reported by Bryce Harrington
6
This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
chrony (Ubuntu)
New
Wishlist
Unassigned

Bug Description

In 4.4-1 (not shipped in Ubuntu), Debian enabled installation of an alternative 'restricted' systemd unit that is provided by upstream as an example. Among other things, this enables running chronyd with the -U (non-root) option.

While Debian lightly patched it to Debianize it, it lacks most of the changes Debian implemented for chrony.service, and indeed I'm a bit unsure how to get it to properly run in a Ubuntu LXD environment (I get errors regarding user credentials). So I get the sense this is going to need some additional attention to adapt and integrate it to make it officially supportable on Ubuntu.

Furthermore, I suspect some consideration to the use case for this could be beneficial. If nothing else, it should be documented somewhere why someone would prefer this vs. the standard chrony, and also how one would enable and configure it. The documentation should also make it clear for users who require strict security settings, what specifically this restriction provides. An autopkgtest case would not be out of place, as well. Does it make more sense to ship restriction functionality as a discrete systemd service (which will need to be maintained in parallel), or to provide a single unified systemd service configuration options to switch between restricted and regular?

Moreover, regardless of handling the above, this also ought to incorporate some of the Ubuntu delta we apply to the service. For example, we remove CAP_SYS_TIME for use in LXD containers; presumably it makes sense that the restricted service should also have this change. What about use of chrony-starter.sh?

Bryce Harrington (bryce)
Changed in chrony (Ubuntu):
importance: Undecided → Wishlist
description: updated
Revision history for this message
Bryce Harrington (bryce) wrote :

Fwiw there is also a chrony-wait service, which I'd ask the same questions of. It, however, has already shipped in Ubuntu as it was provided in 4.3-2 which is shipped in mantic.

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