bin@primate.wisc.edu (Brain in Neutral) (07/25/89)
comsat does not work properly in the system as distributed. /etc/inetd.conf lists /etc/comsat for the comsat service and /usr/etc/comsat for the mcomsat service. Evidently the latter is the one used, HOWEVER, there was no comsat in /usr/etc. This is easily fixed by moving it from /etc to /usr/etc and placing a symlink to /usr/etc in /etc. OS: RISC/os 4.0 Configuration: MIPS M/120, 16MB, 2 328MB disks, cartridge tape, etc. It woud be nice if someone at MIPS could explain just what mcomsat is all about, anyway, and why there comsat and mcomsat both exist, rather than just comsat. Paul DuBois dubois@primate.wisc.edu
djl@mips.COM (Dan Levin) (07/26/89)
In article <450@indri.primate.wisc.edu>, bin@primate.wisc.edu (Brain in Neutral) writes: > It would be nice if someone at MIPS could explain just what mcomsat is all > about, anyway, and why there comsat and mcomsat both exist, rather than just > comsat. Well, as the father of this bastard, I suppose I should at least wave my hands a bit :-) /bin/mail on RISC/os systems is derived from System V, not from BSD. The System V /bin/mail is not setuid root, it is only setgid bin. Since /bin/mail is the guy who has to tell comsat that a message has arrived, and to do that he has to connect to a privileged port, he must be setuid root to work. Now, we wanted to have biff, but we didn't want to fix /bin/mail to be setuid'able, nor did we want to switch over to BSD /bin/mail (for political and qa reasons). So, I left the old comsat service in in case someone wanted to write their own delivery agent that used it, but I also created a non-privileged service called mcomsat (mips comsat if you will). Since our comsat doesn't do anything that could be considered a security risk, allowing it to be talked to on a non-privileged port is not a problem. This allows our setgid /bin/mail to talk to comsat, via mcomsat, and thus allows biff to work when /bin/mail is the delivery agent. 'Nuff said? -- ***dan {decwrl,pyramid,ames}!mips!djl djl@mips.com (No, Really! Trust Me.)