"jlward4" wrote:
One thing I have been thinking about in regards to the whole JMX / microkernel / Middleware stuff is the idea of having different MBeans (or threads) run as different users. I know that the JDK does not support this and custom JNI code would be needed to make this happen, but I really feel that we need this. Here's why from a Unix perspective... I really don't want to run everything as root or any single user. As we pile more services on JMX stack, we will need a way to provide OS level security for those services. For example, I would really love it if somehow JBoss could do the Apache style thing and have a simple small process which runs as root and binds to port 80; Then have everything else run as a different user. This provides good OS level security making remote root exploits in Apache very unlikley. Sure we can do the port forwarding thing, or mod_jk, or proxying... But I think we shouldn't have to. This becomes more of an issue when we start talking about building Java mail servers which run inside of a JMX microkernel. (I saw this mentioned somewhere by a JBoss guy.) So, what do you all think? Is this really nessecary? What are other possible solutions?