suspicious Fedora 'run as root' request?

Question

I am running Fedora 16 and just installed Dropbox from their website. After dismissing the successful installer, I received a 'run as root' authentication popup trying to run the command 'sh /tmp/tmp40RGAW'. I am a little suspicious as it doesn't seem to be initiated by an action on my part.

Here are the relevant files:

/tmp/tmp40RGAW:

#!/bin/sh -e
cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.bak &&
cat /tmp/tmp9nzubR > /etc/fstab &&
mount -o remount /

/tmp/tmp9nzubR:

#
# /etc/fstab
# Created by anaconda on Sat Dec 31 00:50:09 2011
#
# Accessible filesystems, by reference, are maintained under '/dev/disk'
# See man pages fstab(5), findfs(8), mount(8) and/or blkid(8) for more info
#
UUID=78208710-cd4b-495d-9ae0-18b4e3f7a7a1 /                       ext4    defaults,user_xattr        1 1
UUID=17e40587-deb9-424c-83cf-92c51dd9d8a4 swap                    swap    defaults        0 0

Does anybody know what's going on here? Is this something needed by Dropbox?

Thanks

Answer 1

Dropbox is trying to enable extended attributes for your / filesystem. The user_xattr mount option allows creating and modifying extended attributes (xattrs) in the user.* namespace, and Dropbox uses user.com.dropbox.attributes to store various metadata about the files it manages.

I recommend enabling the user xattr support – it is useful to Dropbox, and it won't do any harm otherwise. Edit your fstab, remount the filesystem as in the script, then after some time you can take a look at the attributes stored – getfattr -R -d ~/Dropbox will dump all xattrs for all files inside. I'm not sure what Dropbox keeps there, though.