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Date:      Wed, 27 Apr 2005 00:31:46 -0400 (EDT)
From:      Brandon Kuczenski <brandon@301south.net>
To:        perl@freebsd.org
Subject:   SpamAssassin-3.0.2 patch?
Message-ID:  <20050426220155.C77061@ocean.301south.net>

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A bug has been reported with SpamAssassin running under BSD regarding the 
way perl deals with dropping root privileges.  Since SpamAssassin-3.0.0, 
when spamd spawns child processes, they run with root privileges, even 
if the parent process is running as an unprivileged user.

There is a patch in SpamAssassin bug #3897:
http://bugzilla.spamassassin.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3897

It seems to work.  This is being discussed on the SA mailing list in this 
thread:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.mail.spam.spamassassin.general/66190 
A developer reports that "It's specifically a problem with perl on *BSD
platforms."


Because the patch involves behavior as root, I thought it best to bring it 
to your attention immediately, rather than wait for the change to 
percolate through normal channels.

It also occurs to me that possibly the port should create a directory, 
/var/run/spamd, in which spamd.pid could be stored (since, IIRC, the 
default behavior is to create an unprivileged user spamd, and run as it, 
and spamd does not have write permissions to /var/run.)  Currently, 
default behavior is to use /var/run/spamd.pid as the pidfile, which 
generates an error.

Thanks to all who read this message for maintaining FreeBSD.

-Brandon



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