[PATCH 2/2] [RHEL/6, RHEL/7, Fedora] Drop Requires on openscap-utils. Add a note into manual pages regarding that.

Shawn Wells shawn at redhat.com
Fri May 30 01:54:17 UTC 2014


On 5/27/14, 3:08 PM, Greg Elin wrote:
> In general, it's probably more a documentation and marketing issue. 
> More could be done to publish examples of SSG being used with other tools.

Tenable produces Security Center, and they've documentation on how to 
ingest SCAP content.

The fine folks at SPAWAR authored SCC+SSG documentation, which we merged 
into the user guide (a copy of my scratch space is below, I wouldn't 
recommend bookmarking it):
http://people.redhat.com/swells/scap-security-guide/docs/User_Guide/tmp/en-US/html-single/#sect-User_Guide-Alt_Tools-SCC

Then there's RHN Satellite and OpenSCAP, both which have docs. Ideas 
welcome on additional tools!



> Most people are going to be installing SSG via YUM. If the 
> documentation indicates installing both, that is probably fine.
>
> I agree with Paul that it is nice to install both and oscap is needed 
> to test SSG content.
>
> With my newbie hat on, it's taken me some time to understand the 
> difference between OpenSCAP and SSG. I've been wondering why. After 
> all, I've understood the difference between a browser and html page; 
> between Excel and a Excel file.
>
> I come back to the marketing piece.
>
> Greg
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, May 27, 2014 at 2:57 PM, Paul Tittle (Contractor) 
> <ptittle at cmf.nrl.navy.mil <mailto:ptittle at cmf.nrl.navy.mil>> wrote:
>
>     On 5/27/14 2:43 PM, Shawn Wells wrote:
>>
>>     On 5/26/14, 10:56 AM, Jan Lieskovsky wrote:
>>>
>>>     ...
>>
>>     I'd like to open this up to the community.....  Is it beneficial
>>     for OpenSCAP to simultaneously installed with SSG?
>>
>>     On one side the inclusion means you get tools+content with one
>>     command, which is particularly useful for those new to SCAP. On
>>     the other hand it's been mentioned that this drives users to
>>     believing SSG only works with OpenSCAP. There's no intention of
>>     "forcing" OpenSCAP on people.
>>
>>     So, to the user community, is auto inclusion of OpenSCAP annoying
>>     or useful?
>
>     I think it's useful to require OpenSCAP to be installed
>     simultaneously. It's used to test SSG content, for one.
>
>     There have been some patches recently which were made in response
>     to the latest build of OpenSCAP, such as the world_writeable_files
>     patch. recurse_file_system="local" does something different in the
>     latest OpenSCAP build, which potentially breaks the test for some
>     environments (it broke for mine). This tells me that SSG's tests
>     are somewhat reliant on the SCAP tools that are used with the
>     content.
>
>     If all SCAP tools behaved the same way for all input, I would say
>     that OpenSCAP shouldn't be a requirement for SSG. But they
>     probably don't, so my vote is for requiring OpenSCAP.
>

Given that OpenSCAP is a NIST certified SCAP scanner for RHEL6, and 
OpenSCAP comes natively with RHEL, I lean towards keeping the 
dependency. As other tools mature and become widely available this could 
easily be revisited. Leaning towards easy adoption seems the most 
advantageous path.

Anyone feel strongly *against* the dependency?
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