Robin Hack discovered Samba would enter an infinite loop processing
certain quota-related requests. We eventually tracked this down to a
glibc issue.
Running a (simplified) test case under strace shows that /etc/passwd
is continuously opened and closed:
…
open("/etc/passwd", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 3
lseek(3, 0, SEEK_CUR) = 0
read(3, "root❌0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash\n"..., 4096) = 2717
lseek(3, 2717, SEEK_SET) = 2717
close(3) = 0
open("/etc/passwd", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 3
lseek(3, 0, SEEK_CUR) = 0
lseek(3, 0, SEEK_SET) = 0
read(3, "root❌0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash\n"..., 4096) = 2717
lseek(3, 2717, SEEK_SET) = 2717
close(3) = 0
open("/etc/passwd", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 3
lseek(3, 0, SEEK_CUR) = 0
…
The lookup function implementation in
nss/nss_files/files-XXX.c:DB_LOOKUP has code to prevent that. It is
supposed skip closing the input file if it was already open.
/* Reset file pointer to beginning or open file. */ \
status = internal_setent (keep_stream); \
\
if (status == NSS_STATUS_SUCCESS) \
{ \
/* Tell getent function that we have repositioned the file pointer. */ \
last_use = getby; \
\
while ((status = internal_getent (result, buffer, buflen, errnop \
H_ERRNO_ARG EXTRA_ARGS_VALUE)) \
== NSS_STATUS_SUCCESS) \
{ break_if_match } \
\
if (! keep_stream) \
internal_endent (); \
} \
keep_stream is initialized from the stayopen flag in internal_setent.
internal_setent is called from the set*ent implementation as:
status = internal_setent (stayopen);
However, for non-host database, this flag is always 0, per the
STAYOPEN magic in nss/getXXent_r.c.
Thus, the fix is this:
- status = internal_setent (stayopen);
+ status = internal_setent (1);
This is not a behavioral change even for the hosts database (where the
application can specify the stayopen flag) because with a call to
sethostent(0), the file handle is still not closed in the
implementation of gethostent.
