molly-guard(8)

NAME

molly-guard - guard against accidental shutdowns/reboots

SYNOPSIS

shutdown [-hV] [--molly-guard-do-nothing] [-- script_options]
halt [-hV] [--molly-guard-do-nothing] [-- script_options]
reboot [-hV] [--molly-guard-do-nothing] [-- script_options]
poweroff [-hV] [--molly-guard-do-nothing] [-- script_options]

DESCRIPTION

molly-guard attempts to prevent you from accidentally shutting down or rebooting machines. It does this by injecting a couple of checks before the existing commands: halt, reboot, shutdown, and poweroff. This happens via scripts with the same names in /usr/sbin, so it only works if you have /usr/sbin before /sbin in your PATH!

Before molly-guard invokes the real command, all scripts in /etc/molly-guard/run.d/ have to run and exit successfully; else, it aborts the command. run-parts(1) is used to process the directory.

molly-guard passes any script_options to the scripts, and also populates the environment with the following variables:

· MOLLYGUARD_CMD - the actual command invoked by the user.

· MOLLYGUARD_DO_NOTHING - set to 1 if this is a demo-run.

· MOLLYGUARD_SETTINGS - the path to a shell script snippet which

scripts can source to obtain settings.

molly-guard prints the contents of /etc/molly-guard/messages.d/COMMAND or /etc/molly-guard/messages.d/default to the console, if either exists. This is due to /etc/molly-guard/run.d/10-print-message.

GUARDING SSH SESSIONS

molly-guard was primarily designed to shield SSH connections. This functionality (which should arguably be provided by the openssh-server package) is implemented in /etc/molly-guard/run.d/30-query-hostname.

This script first tests whether the command is being executed from a
tty which has been created by sshd. It also checks whether the variable SSH_CONNECTION is defined. If any of these tests are successful, test script queries the user for the machine´s hostname, which should be
sufficient to prevent the user from doing something by accident.

You can pass the --pretend-ssh script option to molly-guard to pretend that those tests succeeds. Alternatively, setting ALWAYS_QUERY_HOSTNAME in /etc/molly-guard/rc causes the script to always query.

The following situations are still UNGUARDED. If you can think of ways to protect against those, please let me know!

· running sudo within screen or screen within sudo; sudo eats the

SSH_CONNECTION variable, and screen creates a new pty.

· executing those command in a remote terminal window, that is a

XTerm started on a remote machine but displaying on the local X
server.

You have been warned. You can use the --molly-guard-do-nothing switch to prevent anything from happening, e.g. halt
--molly-guard-do-nothing.

OPTIONS

--molly-guard-do-nothing

Cause molly-guard to print the command which would be executed, after processing all scripts, instead of executing it.

-h, --help

Display usage information.

-V, --version

Display version information.

SEE ALSO

shutdown(8), halt(1), reboot(8), poweroff(8).

LEGALESE

molly-guard is copyright by martin f. krafft. Andrew Ruthven came up
with the idea of using the scripts directory and submitted a patch,
which I modified a bit.

This manual page was written by martin f. krafft <madduck@madduck.net>.

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the Artistic License 2.0

COPYRIGHT

Copyright © 2008 martin f. krafft

Apr 19, 2008 MOLLY-GUARD(8)