kern/1967: securelevel should be patchable

[James da Silva]

> > No amount of immutable bits will save us from this one - these
> > daemons can't become active until securelevel is set to 1.
>
> Isn't this something you could relatively easily fix with a call
> to "sysctl -w kern.securelevel=1" placed at the appropriate spot
> in the startup process?

Sounds good to me.

I think the point remains - until all these steps necessary to make the
assumptions underpinning securelevel 1 valid have been well considered and
documented for interested sys-admins, perhaps the default should be to set
securelevel to -1 to avoid an unfortunate misunderstanding.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the main purpose of the
securelevel feature in 4.4BSD was to provide the hook to allow playing with
the implementation of immutable and append-only features in the filesystem,
rather than as a holistic effort to actually make the whole system more
secure.

My main interest in securelevel is to be able to turn the darn thing off
easily so that I can do user-level device driver work. This was slightly
inconvenient under NetBSD 1.0, but 1.1's "options INSECURE" does the trick,
though I object to the implication. :-)

Jaime
..............................................................................
: James da Silva : UMCP Computer Science Dept : Stand on my shoulders, :
: j...@cs.umd.edu : http://www.cs.umd.edu/~jds : not on my toes. :