taylor@hpldat.UUCP (Dave Taylor) (05/04/87)
[within a day or two this will directly post from the submitter...Sorry for
the confusion in the meantime -- Dave Taylor]
From: netnews@erc3bb.UUCP (Avi Feldblum)
Subject: Some comments on elm
Date: 30 Apr 87 23:45:34 GMT
Organization: AT&T Engineering Research Center, Princeton
I have a few comments about installing elm if you are NOT root, as
well as a few questions. I have installed elm on a system where I do
not have root priviliges, and where I can assume it is unlikely that
it will be installed by the sys admin. However, as elm is mainly a
user agent, and uses /bin/mail (or sendmail or smail, neither of
which I can have put up) for the actual delivery of the mail, it
should be usable even if it has no special priviliges. Just for
reference, this is on an AT&T 3b20 running SVR2.
The main problem with running elm NOT as a setgid mail program is that
it doesn't have write permissions in /usr/mail. elm cannot therefore
create the usr.lock file it wishes to create. I sort did an end run
around that problem by telling it to write the lock file in /tmp. I
think it is also checking for a lock file there, so it will miss a
"real" lock file created by mail or something that does run setgid. It
doesn't clean it up after it leaves, so I've missed that code somewhere.
For now I just rm the lock file in /tmp when elm finishes.
The second point I found out (the hard way) is that if you compile elm
and tell it that it will not run as a setgid mail program, after you
read your mail from /usr/mail/logname and tell elm to delete it, elm
will leave a 0 size file with owner logname and group your_group NOT
group mail. If you test things by sending mail to yourself, it will get
written fine, BUT no-one else will be able to send mail to you. A way
around this problem was to comment out the line in leavembox.c where a
chown is done on infile.
I would appreciate hearing from anyone else who has installed elm not as
a setgid mail program, did you have similar problems and/or what
solutions did you come up with.
I so far have been unable to get elm to use the pathalias database
properly. If I go into alias mode and then choose system and give it a
system in the pathalias database that we directly talk to, it will say
something like "you have a direct connection-use (usr)@system". But when
I give it most systems that are in the pathalias file it just says
"can`t expand 'machine'". Once or twice it said "use (usr)@machine" but
did not give the path to that machine, and when I tried sending mail to
that machine, it said "can't expand machine". Has anyone else had any
similar problems or any guesses as to what is going wrong?
Avi Feldblum
ayf@pruxe.att.com or {any major AT&T machine}!pruxe!ayf