- is there a reason you don't use podman instead of rootless docker?
- can you run patchmon inside of docker and mount the socket to the original path inside of the container?
- the symlink has the file permissions of the file it points to. If the socket is owned by a user, so will the symlink, even if you used root/sudo to create the link. (technically the symlink will be owned by root, but the permissions on a symlink are ignored and the permission of the target are used)
- as long as you don't change any permissions on
/var/runor on thedocker.sockto be more permissive than they are now, there is functionally no difference in security - If you or someone else on the system tries to run docker with a different user/root, the symlink will likely cause issues
this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2026
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I'm not fully understanding here, are you saying that the symlink is root because root is required to access /var/run or that its root because its required by patchmon.
If its root because the rest of the /var/run is root, is it not on the table to just chown the /var/run/docker.sock symlink to be the userid? since I would assume that patchmon would be running as the docker user anyway since you are running in a rootless environment? I might be misunderstanding.
As long as your permissions to the symlink are in line with the permissions on the original sock, I wouldn't expect there would be too much risk there. Of course a malicious vector /could/ see that a /var/run/docker.sock exists and try to manipulate it, but, since docker itself isn't root which means that user executing the symlink isn't root, I don't think it would allow for escalation.
Does Patchmon not have a setting to look for the Docker socket in a different location?
I could be wrong but I don't think there's any security issues making a symlink to a socket, since permissions/ACLs on the socket would still apply.
No unfortunately they haven't implemented the option to point to a different docker.sock.