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Date:      Fri, 30 Apr 1999 15:47:18 +0200 (MET DST)
From:      "Pedro J. Lobo" <pjlobo@euitt.upm.es>
To:        freebsd-security@freebsd.org
Subject:   Does mail.local need to be setuid-root?
Message-ID:  <Pine.OSF.4.05.9904301535330.15810-100000@haddock.euitt.upm.es>

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Hello, people.

I have a 3.1-RELEASE machine which, among other tasks, acts as a mail and
telnet server for out students. Recently I noticed that several users were
using more disk space than his quotas should allow (!). After a bit of
investigation, I have traced down the problem to the mail system.

The problem is that you cand send mail to a user that is over quota, and
the system will append the new message to its inbox (located in /var/mail,
as by default). Indeed, root can append data to a file that belongs to a
user that is over quota.

As you may see, it is a rather ugly "feature". So, the question is: does
/usr/libexec/mail.local need to be setuid root? Or, alternatively, can I
use /usr/bin/mail as the local mailer? I also administer an alpha with
Tru64 Unix 4.0d and it uses /bin/mail (no setuid/setgid) as the local
mailer.

TIA,

	Pedro.

-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Pedro José Lobo Perea                   Tel:    +34 91 336 78 19
Centro de Cálculo                       Fax:    +34 91 331 92 29
E.U.I.T. Telecomunicación               e-mail: pjlobo@euitt.upm.es
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
Ctra. de Valencia, Km. 7                E-28031 Madrid - España / Spain



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