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Dedicated service user or not ? (jlai.lu)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Hi all !

As of today, I am running my services with rootless podman pods and containers. Each functional stack gets its dedicated user (user cloud runs a pod with nextcloud-fpm, nginx, postgresql...) with user mapping. Now, my thought were that if an attack can escape a container, it should be contained to a specific user.

Is it really meaningful ? With service users' home setup in /var/lib, it makes a lot of small stuff annoying and I wonder if the current setup is really worth it ?

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[–] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

What kind of annoying things are you dealing with?

You don't have to put the user home in /var/lib either if that helps at all.

If you're already running rootless, I'd keep doing that unless there's a really good reason not to.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    What kind of annoying things are you dealing with?

    Troubleshooting with a machinectl session, switching between services, backing up... It is small annoyances but if I can avoid them i'd like it.

    You don't have to put the user home in /var/lib either if that helps at all.

    I half regret doing it.

    If you're already running rootless, I'd keep doing that unless there's a really good reason not to.

    The plan is about switching to a single user, I will stick to rootless podman this is for sure. It is more about dedicated users or a single one.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    I don't want to tell you one way or the other because it's kinda dubious anyway, but if all services run as the same user the need for root is kinda moot when it comes to crossing between services or expanding the scope of an attack. Of course it is better than all things running as root, but if I popped a machine as some "low privilege" user that still had access to all running services I'm not sure I'd care so much about escalating to root.

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