Is this actually something people are willing to do? I.e. pipe from the Internet directly into a root shell? It seems especially crazy since none of the tools (ps, top, uptime, iostat, vmstat) require special privileges.
In the end you need to basically blindly trust people if you're going to use their software (and the software needs root privileges)
The only problem i have with this is that you can get MITM'd. curl doesn't validate SSL certificates
Curl has an option to explicitly disable cert validation:
-k, --insecure (SSL) This option explicitly allows curl to perform "insecure" SSL connections and transfers. All SSL connections are attempted to be made secure by using the CA certificate bundle installed by default. This makes all connections considered "insecure" fail unless -k, --insecure is used.
Maybe you're thinking of an older version?
(edited for formatting)
It isn't, really. Both are creepy.
As for the product, it looks really good to me. No mention of encryption of stored data in the privacy statement, which might be a concern for some.
Also it wouldn't hurt to make checksums available for the installer and downloaded tar, for more paranoid folks like me.
I don't know Sealion and they can be amazing and all, so don't get this comment wrong.
If they want to support Linux systems properly, instead of using a script like that, I would recommend them to use packages and add support per distribution. Each distribution has different tools to add and manage services, and there are different ways to boot the system services. It's not just adding symlinks anymore because upstart and systemd, etc.
Also I'd love to cleanly upgrade/uninstall/etc their agent, so add a repo and I'll install your agent with more confidence.
How do I know I don't like how they install their agent? Because I didn't pipe the script directly into bash.
This isn't so much different from downloading a random executable and running it. Hell, it's worse than that (since the download doesn't get stored for future audits)! But who said executing random executables from the internet is good in the first place?
SeaLion requires you to use sudo to install it as a service so that it will automatically restart whenever system reboots. All the commands executed by the SeaLion agent are run in the context of Sealion user which is a normal system user.
How can I be sure that the install will be identical across all of my servers?
How can I pin a version that I've vetted for security holes?
How can I distribute this to servers that don't have arbitrary internet access?
How do I configure selinux/apparmor to work with your tool?
How can I uninstall this cleanly?
Curling into a elevated shell is a terrible way to do installs. Packages are cleaner, more secure, and more capable of being trusted. You're making the assumption that your s3 buckets will never be hacked, that your own webservers can never be hacked, and that experienced sysadmins are going to ignore your tool because of the amateur install method.
> How can I be sure that the install will be identical across all of my servers? Whenever you install SeaLion Agent, the most latest binary is installed. The agents in other servers are also updated, hence making them identical always.
> How can I pin a version that I've vetted for security holes? SeaLion agents are released after rigorous testing, to ensure we do not leave any security holes and features, currently SeaLion Agent is designed for auto update.
> How can I distribute this to servers that don't have arbitrary internet access? SeaLion agent requires Internet access to send data to its server. Hence internet access is mandatory.
> How do I configure selinux/apparmor to work with your tool? SeaLion agent works fine with SELinux in enforcing mode without any specific configuration.
> How can I uninstall this cleanly? sudo /usr/local/sealion-agent/uninstall.sh
Checksums are useless if your install script is compromised, as well as if the server hosting the checksums is compromised. Signing everything while using an installer that verifies signatures (like yum, rpm and apt) is more secure, and just relies on you not losing control of your private key, instead of entire servers.
> Whenever you install SeaLion Agent, the most latest binary is installed. The agents in other servers are also updated, hence making them identical always.
Assuming your upgrade location is not compromised. Does your auto-updater check checksums or signatures, or does it rely on your servers always serving up the correct files? What if you push an auto-update that breaks servers?
curl -s https://agent.sealion.com | bash /dev/stdin $1 $2 $3 $4 $5 $6
No offense, but when I'm responsible for what happens on multiple servers I would like to ensure that myself, by checking the tcp payloads, endpoints connected to, files opened, etc. I'm certainly not alone in this.
> SeaLion agent requires Internet access to send data to its server. Hence internet access is mandatory.
Sending data can be accomplished individual firewall rules to whitelisted IPs. s3 is too broad of a target to allow unlimited access to.
> SeaLion agent works fine with SELinux in enforcing mode without any specific configuration.
Great!
> sudo /usr/local/sealion-agent/uninstall.sh
Not the best, but it seems to be clean.
telnet host.domain.com 12345 | sh
And then for a very long time that sort of thing fell out of favor because people got appropriately cautious about security. But I've seen it a lot more lately, starting with Homebrew: http://brew.sh/
but yeah, even though I will just do an apt-get, I still want an option to download and compile myself.
btw, this type of installation is becoming famous these days. I have noticed this type of installers offered by rvm,meteor and some other projects.
Looking at the install script shows that it creates a new user 'sealion' on your behalf, for ease of install?