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Date:      Mon, 27 May 2002 11:54:39 -0700
From:      "Philip J. Koenig" <pjklist@ekahuna.com>
To:        freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Cc:        Lyndon Nerenberg <lyndon@orthanc.ab.ca>, Claus Assmann <freebsd+stable@esmtp.org>
Subject:   Re: non-root /var/run files (was Re: Sendmail, smmsp, and pid file)
Message-ID:  <20020527185439041.AAA472@empty1.ekahuna.com@pc02.ekahuna.com>
In-Reply-To: <200205271824.g4RIOutI008910@orthanc.ab.ca>
References:  Your message of "Mon, 27 May 2002 08:10:26 PDT."             <20020527081026.B29438@zardoc.esmtp.org> 

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On 27 May 2002, at 12:24, Lyndon Nerenberg boldly uttered: 

> [Redirecting to the hackers list -- please respect the reply-to header]


Sigh, well I guess I have another reason to join that list, what the 
heck..


 
> >>>>> "Claus" == Claus Assmann <freebsd+stable@esmtp.org> writes:
> 
>     Claus> On Mon, May 27, 2002, Philip J. Koenig wrote:
>     >> Any particular reason why the sendmail with 4.6-RC is writing sm-
>     >> client.pid into /var/spool/clientmqueue instead of /var/run?
> 
>     Claus> Permissions.
> 
> This points out a short-fall in the /var/run scheme: it can only be used
> by processes running with an euid of 0 at the time they create the file.
> 
> If we have a /var/run/sendmail directory owned by the smmsp user then
> sendmail can create its pid files there. Likewise for bind. The purgedir
> function in /etc/rc (used to clean /var/run) will preserve the existing
> directory structure under /var/run, so the sub-directory tree will
> survive reboots.
> 
> --lyndon

Funny thing about that, I actually created a /var/run/named directory 
for just the purpose of running named in a 'sandbox', chowned the 
directory bind:bind, and because I forgot to set the pid file path in 
named.conf, I see that it seems to write named.pid (owned by 
bind:bind) into /var/run without a problem.

I know some processes "demote" themselves after they initialize, 
maybe this is what the named daemon does.  But you wouldn't know it, 
given the ownership of the pid file. (I'm sure this makes sense to 
people who know about this stuff, it still confuses me)

Maybe the daemon creates the file as root than chown's it?



--
Philip J. Koenig                                       pjklist@ekahuna.com
Electric Kahuna Systems -- Computers & Communications for the New Millenium


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