Date: Sun, 17 Oct 2004 11:39:16 +0100 From: Matthew Seaman <m.seaman@infracaninophile.co.uk> To: Gary Aitken <garya@dreamchaser.org> Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: installation of sendmail milters, security questions Message-ID: <20041017103916.GA9251@happy-idiot-talk.infracaninophile.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <4171D15D.5010004@dreamchaser.org> References: <4171D15D.5010004@dreamchaser.org>
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On Sat, Oct 16, 2004 at 07:56:45PM -0600, Gary Aitken wrote:
> Trying to install milter-greylist.
> After configuring sendmail, and without the milter-greylist daemon
> running, maillog contains messages of the type:
>
> sm-mta[59533]: i9H12H4P059533: Milter (greylist): local socket name
> /var/milter-greylist/milter-greylist.sock unsafe
>
> From what I've been able to dig up, this is because sendmail thinks
> it's unsafe to read/write that socket.
No, this is sendmail's convoluted way of telling you that
milter-greylist isn't actually running, and so it would be unsafe
(ie. might result in lost e-mail) if it was to attempt to communicate
via the socket with that non-existent process. It doesn't have
anything to do with the ownership/permissions of either the
milter-greylist socket, or the milter-greylist process itself.
The answer is just to start up the milter-greylist process.
> Upon checking, I discovered /var/milter-greylist was owned by smmsp,
> so I changed it to root. Unfortunately, that didn't solve the
> problem.
Um... don't do that. Leave the permissions as they were when the port
was installed. The various parts of the mail system are deliberately
configured to run as *non root* for security reasons: essentially, if
someone can take over the process by eg. a buffer overflow attack, all
they get is a process with ordinary user credentials, so limiting the
amount of damage they can do. /var/milter-greylist has to be writable
by the UID milter-greylist runs as, and the best way of doing that is
to give that UID ownership of the directory.
Cheers,
Matthew
--
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil. 26 The Paddocks
Savill Way
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey Marlow
Tel: +44 1628 476614 Bucks., SL7 1TH UK
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