mkwan@csadfa.cs.adfa.oz.au (Matthew Kwan) (03/30/91)
Due to a security hole showing up in the SunOS biff/comsat program, our fascist sysadmin (Hi Mike!) shut it down. Now, biff is an essential part of the programming environment, so I decided to write my own (by modifying my program which exploited the hole in the first place). The idea is to recv from the biff udp port, and get messages of the form user-id@offset whenever mail arrives. Unfortunately I soon found out that the port can only be read with root permission. BUT .. the recv function will wait on the port even though it doesn't have read permissions. It will return with an error only when a message arrives. SO .. it was a fairly simple matter to check each time a biff message arrived whether my /usr/spool/mail entry had been updated. If so, print out the first few lines of the last message. It isn't perfect, but it allows me to function fairly normally - i.e. I don't have to compulsively check my mail every few seconds. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Matthew Kwan - The man with no .signature