From owner-freebsd-hackers  Sat Jul 19 02:38:36 1997
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From: sthaug@nethelp.no
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To: andreas@klemm.gtn.com
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Subject: Re: sendmail complains about being unable to write his pid file
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 18 Jul 1997 17:27:09 +0200"
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Date: Sat, 19 Jul 1997 11:38:25 +0200
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> Sendmail couldn't write his /var/run/sendmail.pid file.
> I saw this behaviour in FreeBSD 2.2.2 and -current.
> 
> I think the newest sendmail version introduces this.
> It's important, that every directory is owned by root.
> 
> FreeBSD's /var/run directory permissions are
> drwxr-xr-x   2 bin    bin        512 Jul 18 17:20 run
> 
> After changing the permissions to:
> drwxr-xr-x   2 root    bin        512 Jul 18 17:20 run
> 
> everything is fine. So we should fix the installation and 
> possibly the mtree files as well.
> 
> Any takers ? Any other voices ???

I'm always nervous about directories owned by bin, on the assumption
that bin might be easier to break than root, and could then be used
as a stepstone to breaking root. So I tend to manually change most
system directories to be owned by root.

*Why* are so many of the FreeBSD system directories owned by bin in
the standard distribution?

Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug@nethelp.no