Mokona Modoki

After installing ConfigServer Security and Firewall, many of us try to achieve as many ‘green’ results as possible. The often tricky one (or two) options to achieve, is mounting /tmp and /var/tmp as ‘separate’ file systems. On a bare metal linux installation (no virtualisation) this is easy to achieve by creating a file system (partition or pseudo file system) and mounting it accordingly. Under virtualisation (openvz, virtuozzo etc) this is not so easy, in fact, it’s not actually supported at all. However, there are two things you can try.

1. Nothing. Just leave it. After all, the message at the bottom of the check security page says ‘This scoring does not necessarily reflect the security of your server or the relative merits of each check’ In other words, getting all green doesn’t necessarily mean your server is secure.
2. You can set up pretend mount points (this works on bare metal installations as well). Delete the /var/tmp directory and symlink it to /tmp (ln -s /tmp /var/tmp). Next, edit your /etc/fstab file and all the following line: /tmp /tmp   ext3    defaults,usrquota,bind,noauto,noexec,nosuid        0 0 Finally, be sure to change the permissions to 1777 (chmod -R 1777).

The second option above doesn’t really achieve anything except the green ‘OK’ from CSF. Traditionally, the /tmp and /var/tmp directory have been located on a separate file system, due to the volatile nature of the files and content that are temporarily stored there. If the server was compromised via this directory, it could be easy to stop the compromise by un-mounting the file system. Better still, if the file system itself was hacked or damaged, it would only be the /tmp and /var/tmp that was damaged, both of which are easily replaced and can be deleted, removed and recreated all while the system is still running, not to mention that no important data is ever stored in these directories either.