On Sat, 10 Jun 2000, JF Martinez wrote:
> >
> > [ speaking for myself here, not my employer and so on ... ]
> >
> > On Fri, 9 Jun 2000, JF Martinez wrote:
> >
> > > > I disagree about no "MTA worth his salt," and sendmail certainly DOES
> > > > deliver mail to root.
> > > >
> > > > You can always create an alias yourself.
> > > >
> > >
> > > I know it but there will be people who don't know about it, forget
> > > it or perhaps one day a person at RedHat makes a mistake and my alias
> > > file is overwritten with a vanilla one where root is not aliased.
> >
> > Ignorance is no excuse. The aliases file is tagged as %config(noreplace)
> > and you will at least be warned what has happened if you upgrade to a
> > package where this is not the case.
> >
>
> This applies if upgrading individually. If I upgrade my entire
> distribution the warning will be lost somewhere in the install.log.
> Yes _I_ check but can you ensure all RedHat's customers check?
Noone can ensure this. But what you want is to cripple a product to
circumvent a hypothetical badly packaged future sendmail package by mixing
(configuration) data and logic. This is pathetic. Thousands of people who
read their root@... mail under their root account would complain.
> You are also missing an important aspect: Linux is affordable by small
> organiuzations. When a system can be afforded only by organizations
> having 2000+ employees that means that the organization can afford to
> have an employee who spends the whole day reading HOWTOs and manpages.
> Now in a five person organization the system administrator has to do a
> thing called _real_ work and that means that he cannot spend days
> reading HOWTOs so he will not know about the problem in the first
> place.
I agree that it would be good to have an alias for root created in the
installation process, but hacking this feature you want to have into
sendmail directly and thus shoving it down peoples' throats whether they
want it or not is not the way to go. File a bugzilla wishlist item for
that.
> Linux in small organizations means the software must get the things
> right out of the box be it for security or whatever instead of giving
> the users all the rope they need to hang thmeselves and rely on them
> being omniscient.
I think the picture should be as such: The rifle/rope/... should be in a
cabin along with the note "Use only if you know what you're doing". If
they decide to dive into the deep swamps of configuration files, they
should inform themselves _before_ twisting this handle and pushing that
button.
> Now as I said everything you do as root is a potential security risk
> so the less you do as root the better (look at MS/DOS for a system
> where the user does normal work as root). And mail (ie data sent by
> strangers) can be a potential vehicle for attacks so as you don't want
> to be at the mercy of a flakey MUA you should alias root. But the guy
> who works in a small organization could be the target of an attack the
> day before reaching the page of the book where he is told how to alias
> root and why he should do it. That is why the MTA should not accept
> to deliver to root: root has no business reading mail
That is your opinion, not everyone else agrees, use the alias and let's
settle this thread.
> Ah! if I remeber well Outlook was not inherently unsecure according to
> MS: it only allowed people to hang themselves.
No, it hung people without asking them beforehands.
Nils
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Nils Philippsen / +49.711.96437.250 / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Red Hat GmbH / Hauptstätter Straße 58 / D70178 Stuttgart
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regarded as a criminal offence. -- Edsger W. Dijkstra
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