"Philip" == Philip Guenther <guenther(_at_)gac(_dot_)edu> writes:
Philip> Jan Vicherek <honza(_at_)ied(_dot_)com> writes:
>> Second, I came up with the following patch. It allows me not to
>> use ~root/.procmailrc for shared /var/spool/mail on local
>> net. So now I have /var/spool/mail/root ->
>> /filesystem/local/to/machines/root_mailbox
Philip> This a) should be controllable on a per-recipe basis; b)
Philip> should default to off; and c) is almost certainly a
Philip> security hole: you are no longer certain that procmail is
Philip> writing to the file specified, as it could be a symlink
Philip> anywhere. If the 'foo' account doesn't have a mailbox in
Philip> /var/spool/mail then someone could just say "ln -s ~
Philip> foo/.rhosts /var/spool/mail/foo" Then do:
Philip> procmail -f $USER -d foo <<EOF
Philip> + + EOF
Philip> Followed by "rlogin -l foo localhost", no?
This would work on my machine, even for a guest account
(/var/spool/mail is 777, and procmail is 4555). However, "ln
~foo/.rhosts ..." would not work; /{home,etc} and /var are on different
file systems. So you could limit the damage by separating the file
systems (it sounds like Jan probably is doing so), and not permitting
softlinks. The /var file system is just too open to attacks and
stupidity (eg, several of my users never move any of their mail out of
their Pine INBOXes, and a couple are well over 1MB; I The Admin, Lord
of All I Survey, once had debug enabled on my ftpd and syslog grew to
5MB within a week with all those PORT commands :-P), so I prefer to
have /var on a separate file system.
Philip> Is creating ~root/.procmailrc so difficult that this is
Philip> better?
:-)
Also, all the textbooks I've ever seen recommend that Postmaster and
Root mail be forwarded to a real user. In that case it makes sense to
create a global alias which would presumably be in a shared
/etc/aliases file. In fact, this ought to work for Jan; he just sets
the mailbox for the root user on the machine containing the
/filesystem/local/to/machines file system to root_mailbox, and then
direct all root mail there.
--
Stephen John Turnbull
University of Tsukuba Yaseppochi-Gumi
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/
Tennodai 1-1-1, Tsukuba, 305 JAPAN
turnbull(_at_)sk(_dot_)tsukuba(_dot_)ac(_dot_)jp