[PLUG] prelink grumble grumble

Keith Lofstrom keithl at kl-ic.com
Fri Jun 22 23:30:05 UTC 2007


There is a program called "prelink" that works with the program loader
to rewrite the symbol tables in libraries and executables for faster
loading.  It is turned on by default in Red Hat derived systems like
Scientific Linux 5, an RHEL 5 clone.

Yikes!

I do disk-to-disk backups with dirvish/rsync (I like dirvish so much,
I host www.dirvish.org  ;-)  )  and have started doing file integrity
monitoring with osiris.  It appears that "prelink" changes the
binaries and libaries while leaving ctime/mtime at previous values.

Just like a virus does, so prelink sets off all sorts of alarms.
Sorry, I would rather have slow, stable and safe instead of fast
and fragile, so bye-bye prelink .

I plan to remove /etc/cron.daily/prelink,  revert my binaries and
libraries with "prelink -au", then comment out all the "-l" lines
in /etc/prelink.conf so that the loader doesn't attempt to do it.

Then I will rebuild my backups, and reinitialize osiris.

Any flaws in my thinking?  Besides the usual, that is ...

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs



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