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Date:      Sun, 22 Nov 1998 13:00:32 +1100 (EST)
From:      Nicholas Charles Brawn <ncb05@uow.edu.au>
To:        Don Lewis <Don.Lewis@tsc.tdk.com>
Cc:        freebsd-security@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Would this make FreeBSD more secure? & sendmail changes in OpenBSD 2.4
Message-ID:  <Pine.SOL.4.02A.9811221300170.28088-100000@banshee.cs.uow.edu.au>
In-Reply-To: <199811211501.HAA29212@salsa.gv.tsc.tdk.com>

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On Sat, 21 Nov 1998, Don Lewis wrote:

: On Nov 16,  9:27pm, Matthew Dillon wrote:
: } Subject: Re: Would this make FreeBSD more secure? & sendmail changes in Op
: 
: } :>	Use TCAPF_LOWPORT to fix xntpd, lpd, bind, sendmail, and possibly
: } :>	others. 
: } :
: } :I'm not convinced that sendmail and lpd require TCAPF_LOWPORT.  I think 
: } :inetd and the 'wait' attribute can do what they need, but I'm all for 
: } :adding the solution as defined above.  It probably would be usefull for 
: } :bind (which as a single process needs to bind to udp/53 as well as tcp/53).
: } 
: }     I don't think they need it either, as long as sendmail and lpd are
: }     started as root and setuid() themselves after binding the port I'd be
: }     happy.
: 
: There are two complications with sendmail that I haven't seen mentioned.
: One is that sendmail will close its listening socket on port 25 when it
: decides that the system load is too high, and reopen the socket when
: the load has dropped to an acceptable level.  The second is that it
: needs to read more 400 .forward files.
: 
: If you use the RunAsUser sendmail configuration feature, you get most
: of the benefits of an immediate setuid() call.  This feature causes
: sendmail to do the setuid() after it does accept() and fork() and
: before it interacts with the remote client.  I use this feature on
: machines that don't do local mail delivery.
: 
: As a matter of fact I've installed two copies sendmail with different
: privileges on some machines.  One copy is installed as /usr/sbin/sendmail,
: /usr/bin/hoststat and /usr/bin/mailq, and it is installed setuid sendmail.
: The other copy is installed as /usr/bin/newaliases, /usr/sbin/smtpd and
: /usr/sbin/purgestat and it is installed mode 555 root.bin.  I invoke smtpd
: as root to run as the listener on port 25, and it is configured with
: "RunAsUser=sendmail".
: 
: 			---  Truck
: 
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: 

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