[Chilli] ioctl Permission Errors in net.c

[Timothy White]

I have an issue that I thought was isolated to a single server with
coova chilli randomly crashing with error messages. I've since upgrade
them from 1.2.5 to 1.2.6 and the issues continued. Thinking it might
be hardware related I just added a cronjob at 5 minute intervals to
check if chilli is running and restart if not.
Since then I have another freshly installed server also having the
same issue. I've checked for IRQ interrupt conflicts and found none
that I can see.

The errors are as below, and sometimes just happen a few times. Other
times they repeat a good number of times before chilli shutsdown

Mar 25 11:32:16 HotSpot coova-chilli[3279]: net.c: 114: 13 (Permission
denied) ioctl(SIOCSIFFLAGS) failed
Mar 25 11:32:18 HotSpot coova-chilli[3280]: net.c: 114: 13 (Permission
denied) ioctl(SIOCSIFFLAGS) failed
Mar 25 11:32:43 HotSpot coova-chilli[3281]: net.c: 114: 13 (Permission
denied) ioctl(SIOCSIFFLAGS) failed
Mar 25 11:32:50 HotSpot coova-chilli[3282]: net.c: 114: 13 (Permission
denied) ioctl(SIOCSIFFLAGS) failed
Mar 25 11:32:51 HotSpot coova-chilli[3283]: net.c: 114: 13 (Permission
denied) ioctl(SIOCSIFFLAGS) failed
Mar 25 11:33:42 HotSpot coova-chilli[3233]: chilli.c: 5801:
CoovaChilli shutting down
Mar 25 11:33:42 HotSpot coova-chilli[3325]: main-script.c: 93: Running
/etc/chilli/down.sh (105/0)
Mar 25 11:33:42 HotSpot coova-chilli[3233]: net.c: 114: 13 (Permission
denied) ioctl(SIOCSIFFLAGS) failed

When it shutsdown it that's the last messages in the syslog until the
cronjob starts it back up again.

Any ideas? The things that comes to my mind first of all is that the
thread trying to work on the device (not sure if it's tun0 or eth1) is
running as chilli and not as root. I believe most of chilli drops root
privs early on, but a thread/fork/process holds onto root for iptables
and other things like that?

Is there a compile time option to prevent it dropping privs so I can
test that theory?

Thanks

Tim