Permissions Question

[Jay Chandler]

Malcolm Kay wrote:
> I am confused (or someone is).
> On all the FreeBSD systems I have immediate access to the file
> /etc/mail/aliases has the default permissions -rw-r--r--, in 
> other words is readable by anyone. On the other 
> hand /etc/mail/aliases.db is sometimes -rw-r----- and sometimes 
> -rw-r--r-- but since it is only an encoded version of aliases 
> and additional restrictions would seem useless.
>
> I can imagine some might object to reason setting either of these 
> o+r, but this does seem to be the norm.
>
> Perhaps someone else has other views. Or perhaps this is some 
> variation when using profix, qmail etc. in place of sendmail.
>
> Malcolm
>  
>   
Postfix is the MTA, but the file itself is NFS shared between all the 
mailservers, and furthermore is used as part of a script that expects 
things to be "just so."

I inherited this setup, and don't dare start changing the permissions on 
key files until I understand what every part of the equation expects to 
see-- an example would be the user mailboxes, wherein the permissions 
were set incorrectly causing Sendmail to choke (dontblamesendmail has 
more on this for the curious).

-- 
Jay Chandler
Network Administrator, Chapman University
714.628.7249 / chandler at chapman.edu
Today's Excuse: user to computer ratio too high.