Hard Links between UNIX Utility Programs

Michael I. Bushnell mike at turing.unm.edu
Wed Aug 3 18:32:22 AEST 1988


In article <3642 at pitt.UUCP> hoffman at vax.cs.pittsburgh.edu (Bob Hoffman) writes:
>In article <185 at chip.UUCP> mparker at chip.UUCP (M. D. Parker) writes:
>>... I want to prevent users from
>>examining the mailq using the /usr/ucb/mailq program

>I believe it can be done by setting protections and group-IDs
>carefully.  First of all, I think it's safe to assume that you
>don't want any of your users executing /usr/lib/sendmail directly
>for any reason.  Sendmail is normally invoked by the users' mail
>agent, e.g. /bin/mail, /usr/ucb/Mail, etc.  I propose a way of
>restricting execution of /usr/lib/sendmail without losing any
>functionality for the users sending or receiving mail or for the
>administration of the mail facility.

Oh, please, please don't inflict pain on your users like this.
What if I want to write my own mail agent?  Say I like emacs?  Then
I get emacs's mail agent, which calls sendmail.  Sendmail is intended
to usable by arbitrary bozos, who will usually want to use a nice
interface instead.  

Also, you can get some access to sendmail with "telnet localhost smtp",
anyway.

-- 
                N u m q u a m   G l o r i a   D e o 

			Michael I. Bushnell
			HASA - "A" division
			mike at turing.unm.edu
	    {ucbvax,gatech}!unmvax!turing.unm.edu!mike



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