Hello,
into many process after leaving its root credentials, usually being
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
= calling some variant of setuid()/setgid()
Is this a security feature of apache or what?
No, this is not Apache-specific. At least on Linux, calling set[ug]id()
turns off the so-called "dumpable" flag for the process. As a regular
user, you can only ptrace (that's the syscall used by strace) processes
which have this flag turned on (naturally, you also need to have the same
[ug]id as the process you're wanting to trace). If you are root or have
the CAP_SYS_PTRACE capability, these restrictions don't apply.
Another example -- if you're using an OpenSSH sshd with privilege
separation turned on, you should see two sshd processes associated with
every connection; one of them running as root, the other one as the user.
Still, you can't trace neither the first, nor the second because of
aforementioned criteria.
Peter
--
[Name] Peter Kosinar [Quote] 2B | ~2B = exp(i*PI) [ICQ] 134813278
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