John Goerzen writes ("Policy question"): ... > The situation is this. There is a mailing list management program that > needs to run setuid to its particular uid (created by adduser in postinst). > It also ought to run setgid to its particular gid (again, created by adduser > in postinst.) It is intended to be run only by a MTA, and as a security > precaution (since it is setuid/setgid), it is best not to let anyone execute > it (also, it would be very easy to forge messages that way.)
In fact, you don't mean that it needs to run setuid. It merely needs to be run _as_ a particular uid. There are several ways of achieving this other than setuid. Two that I can think of that I'd recommend to you are: * userv, which Wichert has already mentioned. * Most MTA's can be configured to run particular sets of aliases etc. as particular uses and/or groups. Ian.