Re: ~/.hosts patch

On Wed, Jun 21, 2006 at 12:54:32AM -0400, Mike Jakubik wrote:
Justin Hibbits wrote:
Hey folks, got an interesting patch. This adds a ~/.hosts file
(personal version of /etc/hosts). It was written against 6-STABLE
about a week before 6.1 was released, and has been sitting collecting
dust for the last month and a half. Currently it augments /etc/hosts
instead of replacing it or prepending it. Any comments? One
suggestion that was made was to make it an nss module so that it could
be controlled by the admin. It probably could use some cleanup as
well, just putting it out here for proof of concept for now, and some
direction.

Just what exactly is the point of having a user specified hosts file?
Seems like a bad idea to me, in terms of security.

It's useful for cases where you want to add shortcuts to hosts as a user
or do interesting ssh port forwarding tricks in some weird cases where
you must connect to localhost:port as remotehost:port due to
client/server protocol bugs.

This patch appears to only support ~/.hosts for non-suid binaries which
is the only real security issue. Any admin relying on host to IP
mapping for security for ordinary users is an idiot so that case isn't
worth worrying about. Doing this as a separate nss module probably
makes sense, but I personally like the feature.

-- Brooks

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