sshd runs with -R flag?

[Robert Watson]

Hi All,

Sorry to interrupt, but I recently downloaded and installed a
pre-compiled package of OpenSSH 3.9p1 for Solaris.

After installation everything seems to work well, but I notice that all
of the child sshd daemons are running with a flag '-R' i.e.

sh-3.00# ps -ef | grep sshd
  root   475     1  0 13:45:23 ?      0:00 /usr/local/sbin/sshd -4
  root   643   475  0 14:10:55 ?      0:00 /usr/local/sbin/sshd -4 -R
  robb   645   643  0 14:11:02 ?      0:06 /usr/local/sbin/sshd -4 -R
  root  1015   475  0 15:09:25 ?      0:00 /usr/local/sbin/sshd -4 -R

Why is that? (the -4 option I added myself, in the startup file).

The -R doesn't seem to be documented anywhere and the archives of this
list didn't reveal anything obvious.

Have I mis-configured something? I wonder if there is a problem with
privilege seperation - I wasn't expecting to see so many processes
running as root.

There is this code in sshd.c - But I cannot guess at its purpose:
"sshd.c" line 1195 of 2021:
...
        if (rexec_flag) {
                rexec_argv = xmalloc(sizeof(char *) * (rexec_argc + 2));
                for (i = 0; i < rexec_argc; i++) {
                        debug("rexec_argv[%d]='%s'", i, saved_argv[i]);
                        rexec_argv[i] = saved_argv[i];
                }
                rexec_argv[rexec_argc] = "-R";
                rexec_argv[rexec_argc + 1] = NULL;
        }
...

I'm running this on Solaris 9, to be exact:
bash-3.00# uname -a
SunOS chamonix 5.9 Generic_117171-15 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-5_10
bash-3.00# /usr/local/sbin/sshd -V
sshd: illegal option -- V
OpenSSH_3.9p1, OpenSSL 0.9.7e 25 Oct 2004

-- 

Yours,
Robb.
 
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