Udo Rader <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Wietse Venema wrote:
>> Summary: Solaris and Linux file system behavior has changed over
>> time, breaking one of the assumptions in Postfix. See below for a
>> description of the behavior and how it disagrees with standards.
>>
>> Postfix is not affected on systems with standard (POSIX, X/Open)
>> file system behavior, i.e. *BSD, AIX, MacOS, HP-UX, and very old
>> Sun/Linux systems. The fix and workarounds are simple.
>>
>> There are efforts to get the non-standard behavior approved by
>> standards (a function called llink). Today's fix for Solaris, Linux
>> etc. also makes Postfix future-proof for such changes.
>
> Wow ... unfortunately throughout the net postfix is blamed for having a
> security problem, when it infact is is an OS problem ...
>
> One more reason to go for *BSD when it comes to anything web related.
This is utter nonsense and the same FUD that is used by other people to
shift the blame on someone else.
If Postfix (or qmail[1], or whatever application) claims to support a
particular operating system (Linux, Solaris - rather than POSIX), then
it has to make proper assumptions to work in that possibly different
environment that Postfix claims to support, rather than blame the OS for
change, development, its developers for design decisions, or whatever.
And that is exactly what has happened after the problem became known:
Wietse modified Postfix to work properly in such environments (i. e. rid
Postfix of assumptions), and rather than remaining silent about this, he
announced the fix publicly.
If I read Wietse's announcement properly, this behaviour changed "ages
ago" (a decade or more) with Linux 2.0 and were not in POSIX 2001
compliance, however I fail where said standards demands resolving the
last component of the pathname so that we get something equivalent to
"ln src dst2" in his test example.
And using *BSD is not necessarily a cure - softdeps, soft updates, also
broke assumptions that some applications made... unlink() for instance
is no longer synchronous.
My suggestion is to attribute the problem to the right part of the
system (Postfix), credit the proper handling of the problem (which did
not affect my configuration, for one) which fortifies the trust I put
into this software, fix the issue on one's own system, and calmly go on
with life.
Best regards
________________
[1] numerous bugs have been reported by various people against this
software and then by author and supported been blamed on outside
circumstances, such as OS behaving differently than the author's
favourite OS, end user not using his brains when following
installation instructions, or whatever.
--
Matthias Andree
