Remediation Scripts

Shawn Wells shawn at redhat.com
Tue Mar 26 02:14:40 UTC 2013


I've been taking a few off-list questions around remediation lately, 
namely from interested parties asking "where do we start?" Wanted to 
move those conversations to on-list. Here's a few of the common 
questions and my thoughts to get us started.


(1) What language(s) should be used?

IMO, bash. I'm leaning this way because it's included in *every* RHEL 
release, whereas puppet modules would require the installation of 3rd 
party software. I'd like to see as much done through 'native' tools as 
possible. There's certainly advantages to Perl (e.g., potential speed) 
however I don't think we want to assume Perl is installed on all RHEL 
machines.


(2) Do we perform checking in the scripts?

Defined further, should the scripts contain conditional checks to see if 
they should be ran?
IMO, no. That's what OVAL is for.


(3) Where do we begin?

- Name remediation scripts after corresponding XCCDF rule
- Build process includes them into final ssg-rhel6-xccdf.xml

Known challenge on passing XCCDF variables through to the scripts, 
however I wouldn't let this hold us up. Still *tons* of work to be done 
while this gets sorted.


There's a good bit of RHEL6 content in the Aqueduct project that (I 
believe) Tresys committed. Perhaps we could reuse those scripts?


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