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Date:      Wed, 31 Mar 1999 09:20:21 +0100
From:      Dom Mitchell <Dom.Mitchell@palmerharvey.co.uk>
To:        Rahul Dhesi <dhesi@rahul.net>
Cc:        freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: 'make installworld' makes /var/mail world-not-writable 
Message-ID:  <E10SGEX-0005Kj-00@voodoo.pandhm.co.uk>
In-Reply-To: Rahul Dhesi's message of "Tue, 30 Mar 1999 18:58:49 -0800" <199903310258.AA09076@waltz.rahul.net> 

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On 30 March 1999, Rahul Dhesi proclaimed:
> "Chad R. Larson" <chad@freebie.dcfinc.com> writes:
> 
> >The user agents are supposed to lock using the lockf(2) call on the
> >mailbox, which is owned by the user.  Mail transport agents, on the
> >other hand, are supposed to run "set group id" to group "mail"....
> 
> Which can work if your FreeBSD box owns the /var/mail filesystem.
> 
> But what if it's just an NFS client and some other server exports
> /var/mail to it, and there are a bunch of other clients that all use
> .lock files on that filesystem?
> 
> 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.

Nope.  Anybody using an NFS mounted /var/mail gets what they deserve.
Use POP3, IMAP and SMTP and stop worrying about things.
-- 
Dom Mitchell -- Palmer & Harvey McLane -- Unix Systems Administrator

	"Value of 2 may go down as well as up"
		-- FORTRAN programmers manual 
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