Upstream has not been tagging new versions for a long time, but we need
compatibility with newer kernels. The 0.6.2 versions already have a bunch of
backported compatibility patches, but 3.14 kernels need even more.
Also, the git versions have fixed a bunch of crashes and other bugs, so perhaps
we should just bite the bullet and just use recent git versions (as sometimes
upstream recommends, when people run into bugs).
This adds a new "boot.zfs.useGit" boolean option, so that a user can
easily opt into using the git versions.
What this allows us to do is define a "dumpcap" setuid wrapper in NixOS
and have wireshark use that instead of the non-setuid dumpcap binary
that it normally uses.
As far as I can tell, the code that is changed to do lookup in PATH is
only used by wireshark/tshark to find dumpcap. dumpcap, the thing that's
typically setuid, is not affected by this patch. wireshark and tshark
should *not* be installed setuid, so the fact that they now do lookup in
PATH is not a security concern.
With this commit, and the following config, only "root" and users in the
"wireshark" group will have access to capturing network traffic with
wireshark/dumpcap:
environment.systemPackages = [ pkgs.wireshark ];
security.setuidOwners = [
{ program = "dumpcap";
owner = "root";
group = "wireshark";
setuid = true;
setgid = false;
permissions = "u+rx,g+x";
}
];
users.extraGroups.wireshark.gid = 500;
(This wouldn't have worked before, because then wireshark would not use
our setuid dumpcap binary.)
This makes running wireshark (or more specifically, dumpcap) as root a
bit more secure. From <wireshark-1.11.2>/doc/README.packaging:
The "--with-libcap" option is only useful when dumpcap is installed
setuid. If it is enabled dumpcap will try to drop any setuid privileges
it may have while retaining the CAP_NET_ADMIN and CAP_NET_RAW
capabilities. It is enabled by default, if the Linux capabilities
library (on which it depends) is found.
