From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Jul 31 19: 5:13 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from kirk.dsl.visi.com (kirk.dsl.visi.com [209.98.248.172]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id F338637BDB4 for ; Mon, 31 Jul 2000 19:05:09 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dgl@visi.com) Received: from localhost (dgl@localhost) by kirk.dsl.visi.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id VAA04414; Mon, 31 Jul 2000 21:05:06 -0500 (CDT) (envelope-from dgl@visi.com) X-Authentication-Warning: kirk.dsl.visi.com: dgl owned process doing -bs Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2000 21:05:06 -0500 (CDT) From: Doug Lee To: Chris Fedde Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Best /var/mail permissions? In-Reply-To: <200008010155.e711t8d08090@fedde.littleton.co.us> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Pine claims to share the locking scheme used by most mail delivery agents, so it can coordinate with the delivery agents and avoid corrupting mailboxes. This locking scheme involves creating a lock file in /var/mail, which Pine can't do without the 1777 permissions because it runs as the user. In my experience, if I don't give it the 1777 perms in /var/mail, it uses file locking techniques but takes noticeably more time at it. With 1777, it's really snappy. :-) But 1777 made me nervous, and that's why I'm here. :-) -- Doug Lee dgl@visi.com http://www.visi.com/~dgl On Mon, 31 Jul 2000, Chris Fedde wrote: > On Mon, 31 Jul 2000 19:39:18 -0500 (CDT) Doug Lee wrote: > +------------------ > | Pine wants me to set mode 1777 on /var/mail, and doing so makes Pine much > | faster at some operations like expunge and checking for new mail when I > | hit `n' at the end of the message index. `make world' seems to reset > | /var/mail to 770 however. I know mode 1777 lets users slip files up to > | their quota limits into /var/mail but know of no other dangers to that > | mode. > | > | Is there a major reason I should not (or should, for that matter) use mode > | 1777 for /var/mail? > +------------------ > > I'd be concerned about making this directory anyu kind of 777. There are > probably a few race conditions that could be exploited when deleting and > creating mail folders. Of course if these conditions are being exploited > you probably have other problems too ;-) > > What's pine tucking up there that it needs world write for anyway? > > chris > > -- > Chris Fedde > 303 773 9134 > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message