Problems with procfs

Hi,

I don't know wether i'm right on this list or not, but i didn't know where i can find some answers to my problem with procfs. I'm administrating approx. 60 linux machines (all of them ubuntu 8.04 or 10.04 LTS). All of them are dedicated servers. On 2 machines (both ubuntu 10.04 LTS of www.OVH.fr), i've discovered some strange filesystem permissions of the /proc directory. The machine m88 got newly installed with a fresh image by OVH:

root@m88:~# ls -al /proc/
total 4
dr-xr-xr-x 117 root   root      0 2011-05-09 20:49 .
drwxr-xr-x  22 root   root   4096 2011-05-09 20:42 ..
dr-x------   6 root   root      0 2011-05-09 20:50 1
dr-x------   6 root   root      0 2011-05-09 20:50 10
dr-x------   6 root   root      0 2011-05-09 20:50 11
dr-x------   6 root   root      0 2011-05-09 20:50 12
dr-x------   6 root   root      0 2011-05-09 20:50 13
dr-x------   6 root   root      0 2011-05-09 20:50 1359
[...]

As you see the directory has 500 permissions. ( On all other machines the /proc has 555 permissions. ) This leads to the strange behavior, that a non-root user cannot see all proccesses running:

root@m88:~# su - marco
marco@m88:~$ ps aux
USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
marco    15773  0.0  0.0  37096  1408 pts/0    S    10:58   0:00 su - marco
marco    15774  5.5  0.0  24180  6876 pts/0    S    10:58   0:00 -su
marco    15799  0.0  0.0  15296  1216 pts/0    R+   10:58   0:00 ps aux
marco@m88:~$

This is the kernel that is running:

root@m88:~# uname -a
Linux m88 2.6.38.2-grsec-xxxx-grs-ipv6-64 #1 SMP Fri Apr 15 17:44:15 UTC 2011 x86_64 GNU/Linux

And there is something else, that is strange:

root@m88:~# lsmod
Opening /proc/modules: No such file or directory

Does anyone have any idea why this is happening?
Is there maybe a sysctl setting, where i can change the /proc permissions?

Thanks in advance for any reply,
Marco

Aha. "grsec".

You run a kernel with grsecurity compiled in, this sort of stuff happens by design.