Document how Radicale can be sandboxed

[hdatma]

Hello,
#1: Python is a knife without safe handle: it makes it easy to cut yourself. A single line of Python at the unix terminal is good enough to turn any folder into a web page. How do you sandbox Radicale?
#2: Python uses 100MB of disk space. PyPy uses 99MB of disk space. How do you compile Radicale into a stand-alone installation?

[Unrud]

1. Radicale has no sandboxing built-in. Just use common practices.
   • Run it as an unprivileged user, that only has write access to the collection.
   • Make also sure that it can't read sensitive files (like home directories if it's running on your personal computer).
   • Be aware that the built-in webserver doesn't enforce any limits on connections, request sizes etc. and thus is prone to DOS attacks. You maybe want to set limits for CPU and RAM usage to protect the rest of the system from slowing down or even better use are real webserver.
2. CPython uses 25 MB on Debian. You could further reduce this by cherry-picking modules from the standard library.

[hdatma]

1. When using python to serve an internet port, strong sandboxing/chrooting should be in the project.
2. Python/CPython on OSX takes exactly 101.8 MB. Did anybody run Radicale under cython.org safely?

[kousu]

I see this as a documentation issue: document how to sandbox radicale under Linux, OS X, and FreeBSD and call it a day. Process privilege separation is a thing OSes are good at! Don't reinvent the wheel, etc.

[liZe]

I keep point 1 as a documentation issue.

[stephane-martin]

Systemd is your friend: http://0pointer.net/public/systemd-nluug-2014.pdf

I'll post an example later :)

[Unrud]

Systemd is your friend:

@hdatma said that he is using OSX. Having configuration examples for different init systems would be nice though..

[untitaker]

I don't see why Radicale is responsible for documenting this.