topic Re: Oracle's old hide.c program in Operating System - HP-UX

Oracle's old hide.c program

VAS_1 — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 18:40:03 GMT

Does anyone use the 1992 hide.c program (I think provided by Oracle at one time)? If you do, have you used it on Integrity HP-UX 11.23?

Victoria

Re: Oracle's old hide.c program

A. Clay Stephenson — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 20:07:28 GMT

It's extremely ugly C (and you will have to use the Bundled C Compiler to compile) as no development compilers will handle K&R syntax any more but it should work. This is really not a secure solution especially since you are essentially trying to hide from a ps -f something like username/passwd. You could always authenticate users as OS_users for sqlplus and that would be far more secure. Moreover, your ultra top secret passwords would no longer have to be kept as plaintext inside scripts.

Re: Oracle's old hide.c program

VAS_1 — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 08:41:59 GMT

I know it is the ugliest C -- and I won't touch on security issues. However, it is what the DBAs use and moving them into the 21st century doesn't seem to be an option.

It actually does compile -- with gcc and with the HP ANSI C compiler. Go figure.

Re: Oracle's old hide.c program

James R. Ferguson — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 09:01:14 GMT

Hi Victoria:

As a matter of interest, with 11.23, you can (at least) limit the default length of the command line shown by 'ps'. The manpages note:

"The default length of the COMMAND field will be 128 (including the null terminator). This can be configured by setting DEFAULT_CMD_LINE_WIDTH=value in the /etc/default/ps file. The value of DEFAULT_CMD_LINE_WIDTH should be between 64 and 1024."

Regards!

...JRF...

Re: Oracle's old hide.c program

VAS_1 — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 09:10:51 GMT

I love the configurable ps display, since I admin machines which run java processes with their incredibly long command lines :) That doesn't buy me what they need in this instance, though.

Is there an internals or kernel person reading this who knows if POSIX limits, perhaps on PATH_MAX, were enforced in 11.23 but not in 11.11?

I should probably move this question.

Re: Oracle's old hide.c program

A. Clay Stephenson — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 09:47:06 GMT

You can only use the ANSI C compiler as long as it is around and I recently received notice that only aCC (which does not speak K&R) will be available from HP in the future. In any event, converting this code to ANSI C is trivially easy.