Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!kl-cs!jonathan
From: jonathan@cs.keele.ac.uk (Jonathan Knight)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail
Subject: Re: Bizare problem with sendmail
Message-ID: <451@kl-cs.UUCP>
Date: 9 Jan 89 12:09:25 GMT
References: <199@technix.oz.au>
Organization: University of Keele, England
Lines: 25

In article <3644@phri.UUCP>, roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) writes:
> 	The basic symptoms are as follows:  If you send local mail, the
> file in /usr/spool/mail/ ends up being owned by the sender.  If you send
> mail that gets delivered over the network (with the faulty machine on the
> receiving end) the spool file ends up being owned by deamon.  It looks for
> all the world like sendmail has stopped being suid root, but:
> wombat> ls -l /usr/lib/sendmail
> -r-sr-x--x  1 root       139264 Nov  9 17:03 /usr/lib/sendmail*

OK, here's my little bit.  Sendmail will reset its uid to the originator
of the mail (which is daemon for networked mail) whenever it invokes the
program to do the next step of the delivery.  For local mail this is /bin/mail
so you need to make sure that this is setuid to root.  As far as I know
sendmail never touches /usr/spool/mail/ at all, it relies on /bin/mail to
do the work.  If you're using a NFS /usr/spool/mail/ then new problems
arise with regard to root access to the disk.  Normally users mailboxes
turn up owned by user 'nobody', to get around this you have to make sure mail
is delivered on the machine which does not have /usr/spool/mail/ as an
NFS mounted partition.

-- 
  ______    JANET :jonathan@uk.ac.keele.cs     Jonathan Knight,
    /       BITNET:jonathan%cs.kl.ac.uk@ukacrl Department of Computer Science
   / _   __ other :jonathan@cs.keele.ac.uk     University of Keele, Keele,
(_/ (_) / / UUCP  :...!ukc!kl-cs!jonathan      Staffordshire.  ST5 5BG.  U.K.