Post-installation actions

Review permissions required by Sarus

During execution

• Sarus must run as a root-owned SUID executable and be able to achieve full root privileges to perform mounts and create namespaces.

• Write/read permissions to the Sarus's centralized repository. The system administrator can configure the repository's location through the centralizedRepositoryDir entry in sarus.json.

• Write/read permissions to the users' local image repositories. The system administrator can configure the repositories location through the localRepositoryBaseDir entry in sarus.json.

Security related

Because of the considerable power granted by the requirements above, as a security measure Sarus checks that critical files and directories opened during privileged execution meet the following restrictions:

• They are owned by root.

• They are writable only by the owner.

• All their parent directories (up to the root path) are owned by root.

• All their parent directories (up to the root path) are writable only by the owner (no write permissions to group users or other users).

The files checked for the security conditions are:

• sarus.json in Sarus' configuration directory <sarus install prefix>/etc.

• sarus.schema.json in Sarus' configuration directory <sarus install prefix>/etc.

• The init binary pointed by initPath in sarus.json.

• The OCI-compliant runtime pointed by runcPath in sarus.json.

• All the OCI hooks JSON files in the hooksDir directory specified in sarus.json.

• All the executables specified in the OCI hooks JSON files.

For directories, the conditions apply recursively for all their contents. The checked directories are:

• The directory where the Sarus engine and hook binaries are installed (<sarus install prefix>/bin).

• The directory where Sarus creates the OCI bundle. This location can be configured through the OCIBundleDir entry in sarus.json.

• If the SSH Hook is installed, the directory of the custom SSH software.

Most security checks can be disabled through the corresponding parameter in the Sarus configuration file. Checks on sarus.json and sarus.schema.json are always performed, regardless of the parameter value.

Important

The ability to disable security checks is only meant as a convenience feature when rapidly iterating over test and development installations. It is strongly recommended to keep the checks enabled for production deployments.

Load required kernel modules

If the kernel modules listed in Requirements are not loaded automatically by the system, remember to load them manually:

sudo modprobe loop
sudo modprobe squashfs
sudo modprobe overlay

Automatic update of Sarus' passwd cache

When executing the configure_installation script, the passwd and group information are copied and cached into <sarus install prefix>/etc/passwd and <sarus install prefix>/etc/group respectively. The cache allows to bypass the host's passwd/group database, e.g. LDAP, which could be tricky to configure and access from the container. However, since the cache is created/updated only once at installation time, it can quickly get out-of-sync with the actual passwd/group information of the system. A possible solution is to periodically run a cron job to refresh the cache. E.g. a cron job and a script like the ones below would do:

$ crontab -l
5 0 * * * update_sarus_user.sh

$ cat update_sarus_user.sh

#!/bin/bash

/usr/bin/getent passwd > <sarus install prefix>/etc/passwd
/usr/bin/getent group  > <sarus install prefix>/etc/group