[Tails-dev] Include gdm logs in whisperback

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Author: alan
Date:  
To: tails-dev
Subject: [Tails-dev] Include gdm logs in whisperback

Hi,

During debugging of Tails 0.12 boot issues, it appeared that it wolud be
very useful for debugging such issues to have GDM logs included in bug
reports.

Candidates seems to be both stuff in /var/log/gdm3 and /var/lib/gdm3.

I just had a look at this, and got several points to clarify.

1) what to include?

- /var/log/gdm3 contains three files:
  - :0-slave.log: useful, contains session and postlogin scripts output
  - :0-greeter.log: tails-greeter log. Might be useful but contains tons
    of shit. If we want to include it, then we proably want to teach
    t-g to be less verbose (should be easy to do as it uses python
    logging facility).
  - :0.log: useless (I think), gdm's X server log
- /var/lib/gdm3 doesn't contain logs but configuration snippets written
  by t-g. This one might include passwords that we would have to clean.
  Do we really want to include the options selected by the user?


2) How to include them?

/var/log/gdm3 belongs to root:Debian-gdm with mode 1770. This is set
each time gdm3 starts. This is hardcoded in gdm if I understard it well:

daemon/main.c:259

    static void
    check_logdir (void)
    {
            struct stat     statbuf;
            int             r;
            const char     *log_path;


            log_path = LOGDIR;


            r = g_stat (log_path, &statbuf);
            if (r < 0 || ! S_ISDIR (statbuf.st_mode))  {
                    if (g_mkdir (log_path, 0755) < 0) {
                            gdm_fail (_("Logdir %s does not exist or isn't a directory."),
                                      log_path);
                    }
                    g_chmod (log_path, S_IRWXU | S_IRGRP | S_IXGRP | S_IROTH | S_IXOTH);
            }
    }


Thus, I see several possibilities:

- have an helper (GDM postlogin script?) chmoding /var/log/gdm3. Seems
me not that nice;
- have an helper (GDM postlogin script?) copying the logs we want to
another location;
- other ideas?

Cheers


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