From owner-freebsd-stable Tue Mar 30 20:14:39 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from guru.phone.net (guru.phone.net [209.157.82.120]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 69E641556D for ; Tue, 30 Mar 1999 20:14:37 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from mwm@phone.net) Received: (qmail 94677 invoked by uid 100); 31 Mar 1999 04:14:18 -0000 Received: from localhost (sendmail-bs@127.0.0.1) by localhost with SMTP; 31 Mar 1999 04:14:18 -0000 Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 20:14:18 -0800 (PST) From: Mike Meyer To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: 'make installworld' makes /var/mail world-not-writable In-Reply-To: <199903310258.AA09076@waltz.rahul.net> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Tue, 30 Mar 1999, Rahul Dhesi wrote: > Unlike / and /usr and /etc, which can be considered private to each > machine, /var/mail is much more likely to be a global filesystem with a > site-wide, not machine-specific, file locking policy and permissions. Odd - I thought the *point* of the /var file system was that it contained things that VARied from machine to machine. That's why things that lived on /usr in 4.[23]BSD migrated onto it - so that /usr could be shared across machines that had the same binary format. But you're right - the default behavior for /var/mail assumes that you're not sharing it across multiple systems. On the other hand, the default MTA makes the same assumptions (or it did when I quit using it) - and you have to fix that as well. Changing the mail spool structure/permissions when you change the MTA behavior seems reasonable. As for lowering the security of the default installation to avoid that particular change - I'd say no. The only time this should really matter is upgrading from source. In that case, if /etc/make.conf sets NO_SENDMAIL to true, then /var/mail shouldn't be touched.