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As mentioned in the introduction, it's not a good idea to run BIND as root. So,
before we begin, let's create a separate user for BIND. Note that you should
never use an existing generic user like nobody for this purpose.
However, some distributions, such as SuSE and Linux Mandrake have started
providing a specific user (generally called named); you can simply adapt
this user for our purposes, if you like.
This requires adding a line something like the following to /etc/passwd:
named:x:200:200:Nameserver:/chroot/named:/bin/false
And one like this to /etc/group:
named:x:200:
This creates a user and group called named for BIND. Make sure that the
UID and GID (both 200 in this example) are unique on your system. The shell is
set to /bin/false because this user will never need to log in.
Now, we must set up the directory structure that we will use for the chroot jail
in which BIND will live. This can be anywhere on your filesystem; the truly
paranoid may even want to put it on a separate volume. I shall assume that you
will use /chroot/named. Let's start by creating the following directory
structure:
/chroot
+-- named
+-- bin
+-- dev
+-- etc
| +-- namedb
+-- lib
+-- var
+-- run
Assuming that you have already done a conventional installation of BIND and are
using it, you will already have an existing named.conf and zone files.
These files must now be moved (or copied, to be safe) into the chroot jail, so
that BIND can get at them. named.conf goes in /chroot/named/etc,
and the zone files can go in /chroot/named/etc/namedb. For example:
# cp -p /etc/named.conf /chroot/named/etc/
# cp -a /var/named/* /chroot/named/etc/namedb/
BIND will likely need to write to the namedb directory, and probably some
of the files in it. For example, if your DNS serves as a slave for a zone, it
will have to update that zone file. Also, BIND can dump statistical
information, and does so in this directory. For that reason, you should
probably make the named user the owner of this directory and its contents:
# chown -R named:named /chroot/named/etc/namedb
BIND will also need to write to the /var/run directory, to put its
pidfile and ndc socket there, so let's allow it to do so:
# chown named:named /chroot/named/var/run
Once BIND is running in the chroot jail, it will not be able to access files
outside the jail at all. However, it needs to access a few key files, such
as the system's C library. Exactly what libraries are required will depend on
your flavour of UNIX. For most modern Linux systems, the following commands
will be sufficient to put the necessary libraries in place:
# cd /chroot/named/lib
# cp -p /lib/libc-2.*.so .
# ln -s libc-2.*.so libc.so.6
# cp -p /lib/ld-2.*.so .
# ln -s ld-2.*.so ld-linux.so.2
As an alternative, you could simply build statically-linked versions of the BIND
binaries to put in your chroot jail. You should also copy ldconfig into
the jail, and run it to create an etc/ld.so.cache for the jail environment.
The following commands could take care of this:
# cp /sbin/ldconfig /chroot/named/bin/
# chroot /chroot/named /bin/ldconfig -v
BIND needs one more system file in its jail: good ol' /dev/null. Again,
the exact command necessary to create this device node may vary from system to
system; check your /dev/MAKEDEV script to be sure. Some systems may also
require /dev/zero. For most Linux systems, we can use the following
command:
# mknod /chroot/named/dev/null c 1 3
Finally, you need a couple extra files in the /etc directory inside the
jail. In particular, you must copy /etc/localtime (this sometimes known
as /usr/lib/zoneinfo/localtime on some systems) in there so that BIND
logs things with the right time on them, and you must make a simple group
file with the named group in it. The following two commands will take
care of this:
# cp /etc/localtime /chroot/named/etc/
# echo 'named:x:200:' > /chroot/named/etc/group
Keep in mind that the GID, 200 in this example, must match the one you defined
in the real /etc/group above.
Unlike a conventional jailbird, BIND can't just scribble its log entries on the
walls :-). Normally, BIND logs through syslogd, the system logging daemon.
However, this type of logging is performed by sending the log entries to the
special socket /dev/log. Since this is outside the jail, BIND can't use
it any more. Fortuantely, there are a couple options to work around this.
The Ideal Solution
The ideal solution to this dilemma requires a reasonably recent version of
syslogd which supports the -a switch introduced by OpenBSD.
Check the manpage for your syslogd(8) to see if you have such a
version.
If you do, all you have to do is add the switch ``-a
/chroot/named/dev/log'' to the command line when you launch syslogd.
On systems which use a full SysV-init (which includes most Linux distributions),
this is typically done in the file /etc/rc.d/init.d/syslog. For example,
on my Red Hat Linux system, I changed the line
daemon syslogd -m 0
to
daemon syslogd -m 0 -a /chroot/named/dev/log
On Caldera OpenLinux systems, they use a daemon launcher called ssd,
which reads configuration from /etc/sysconfig/daemons/syslog. You
simply need to modify the options line to look like this:
OPTIONS_SYSLOGD="-m 0 -a /chroot/named/dev/log"
Similarly, on SuSE systems, I'm told that the best place to add this switch
is in the /etc/rc.config file. Changing the line
SYSLOGD_PARAMS=""
to read
SYSLOGD_PARAMS="-a /chroot/named/dev/log"
should do the trick.
Once you've figured out how to make this change for your system, simply
restart syslogd, either by killing it and launching it again (with
the extra parameters), or by using the SysV-init script to do it for you:
# /etc/rc.d/init.d/syslog stop
# /etc/rc.d/init.d/syslog start
Once it's been restarted, you should see a ``file'' in /chroot/named/dev
called log, that looks something like this:
srw-rw-rw- 1 root root 0 Mar 13 20:58 log
The Other Solutions
If you have an older syslogd, then you'll have to find another way to do
your logging. There are a couple programs out there, such as holelogd,
which are designed to help by acting as a ``proxy'' and accepting log entries
from the chrooted BIND and passing them out to the regular /dev/log
socket.
Alteratively, you can simply configure BIND to log to files instead of going
through syslog. See the BIND documentation for more details if you choose to go
this route.
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