Install Bash pfSense

[andresense]

Is there any problem in installing BASH in pfSense?

[jimp]

We don't generally recommend doing so (Bash has had some security issues over time), but it's not an awful thing to do in general so long as you're aware of it being there and that it might need updating occasionally. On 2.3 it is in our pkg repository, so doing "pkg install bash" will work.

[guardian]

@jimp:

We don't generally recommend doing so (Bash has had some security issues over time), but it's not an awful thing to do in general so long as you're aware of it being there and that it might need updating occasionally. On 2.3 it is in our pkg repository, so doing "pkg install bash" will work.

I installed bash as directed, but I got a message about needing to mount something.

Can someone tell me what this is about or more importantly what are the implications to the system of doing this.

As you can see Bash does start and appears to run, but I suspect that there may be errors if I try to do anything serious with it.

Can I safely follow the directions, or should I uninstall it?

# pkg search bash
bash-4.3.42_1                  The GNU Project's Bourne Again SHell
# pkg install bash
Updating pfSense-core repository catalogue...
pfSense-core repository is up-to-date.
Updating pfSense repository catalogue...
pfSense repository is up-to-date.
All repositories are up-to-date.
The following 1 package(s) will be affected (of 0 checked):

New packages to be INSTALLED:
        bash: 4.3.42_1 [pfSense]

The process will require 5 MiB more space.
1 MiB to be downloaded.

Proceed with this action? [y/N]: y
Fetching bash-4.3.42_1.txz: 100%    1 MiB   1.1MB/s    00:01
Checking integrity... done (0 conflicting)
[1/1] Installing bash-4.3.42_1...
[1/1] Extracting bash-4.3.42_1: 100%
Message from bash-4.3.42_1:
======================================================================

bash requires fdescfs(5) mounted on /dev/fd

If you have not done it yet, please do the following:

        mount -t fdescfs fdesc /dev/fd

To make it permanent, you need the following lines in /etc/fstab:

        fdesc   /dev/fd         fdescfs         rw      0       0

======================================================================
# bash
[root@pfsense ~]# id
uid=0(root) gid=0(wheel) groups=0(wheel),2(kmem),3(sys),4(tty),5(operator),20(staff),31(guest),1999(admins)
[root@pfsense ~]# exit
#
# ls /dev/fd
0       1       2
# cat /etc/fstab

[Gertjan]

@guardian:

Can I safely follow the directions, or should I uninstall it?
…..

its a FreeBSD && bash thing, so check this out https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/50214/  ;)

[kpa]

Don't use bash if you can help it. For simple scripts that you're writing yourself it's perfectly fine to stick to just /bin/sh and the capabilities it offers, the general wisdom is that if you need advanced features of a shell you're better off with perl or python. If you're installing software that absolutely requires bash then it's a different story.

[guardian]

@kpa:

Don't use bash if you can help it. For simple scripts that you're writing yourself it's perfectly fine to stick to just /bin/sh and the capabilities it offers, the general wisdom is that if you need advanced features of a shell you're better off with perl or python. If you're installing software that absolutely requires bash then it's a different story.

I think I'll take your advice… i looked at the thread mentioned above, but given the importance of security on this box, I'm not prepared to go that far given my very limited knowledge of FreeBSD.

I ran pkg remove bash

# echo y | pkg remove bash

Checking integrity... done (0 conflicting)
Deinstallation has been requested for the following 1 packages (of 0 packages in the universe):

Installed packages to be REMOVED:
	bash-4.3.42_1

The operation will free 5 MiB.

Proceed with deinstalling packages? [y/N]: [1/1] Deinstalling bash-4.3.42_1...
[1/1] Deleting files for bash-4.3.42_1: .......... done

Is there anything else I need to do to clean up the system?
Should I do pkg clean? Could this screw something up?

Thanks

[kpa]

You can run 'pkg autoremove' to remove all dependencies that were automatically installed and are no longer needed. That will be enough.