Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!know!samsung!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wuarchive!udel!princeton!twg.com!david From: david@twg.com (David S. Herron) Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp Subject: Re: Support your local PostMaster (was Re: Standard site aliases . . .) Message-ID: <7999@gollum.twg.com> Date: 27 Sep 90 17:19:11 GMT References: <5376@thebes.Thalatta.COM> <1990Sep25.120211.3951@news.clarkson.edu> <5624@munnari.oz.au> <1639.26ffec90@dcs.simpact.com> Reply-To: david@twg.com (David S. Herron) Organization: The Wollongong Group, Palo Alto, CA Lines: 36 In article <1639.26ffec90@dcs.simpact.com> jeh@dcs.simpact.com writes: >In article , bob@MorningStar.Com >(Bob Sutterfield) writes: >> In article <5624@munnari.oz.au> ianr@mullian.ee.mu.oz.au (Ian ROWLANDS) writes: >> Anyway, what's wrong with mailing to root? >> >> Some operating systems don't call their idea of a superuser "root". > >And on some of them, we never log into the "SYSTEM" account anyway -- it is >such an obvious target for penetration attempts that we routinely disable it >for interactive logins. Funny thing, but the system startup procedure doesn't >bother to read its mail. > >We already tell DECUS uucp sites to forward "postmaster" to a real person >(probably the person reading the installation instructions). If there are >other "standard aliases" we should be setting up, please let me know! If I were trying to reach your system administrator, and had no idea who that was, I'd try various things like "root" and "sysadm". I wouldn't necessarily try "postmaster" .. On Unix we also rarely have people logging in directly to "root" as their normal course of running the system. Also people rarely read mail as if they are root. Instead normally aliases are installed redirecting root's mail to the interested people/person and they read it as part of their normal mail. I would expect a VMS system to do the same, but substituting "SYSTEM" for "root". -- <- David Herron, an MMDF & WIN/MHS guy, <- Formerly: David Herron -- NonResident E-Mail Hack <- <- Sign me up for one "I survived Jaka's Story" T-shirt!