On Thu, 24 Jan 2008, David Allan wrote:
On Wed, 23 Jan 2008, Scott Ehrlich wrote:
I try not to wear out the list, but do what the list was created for -
discussion and inquiry of UNIX and related topics.
I don't think you'll wear out the list, but I would like clearer statements
about the user's goals along with the technical questions. Writing down the
user's goals frequently exposes assumptions that totally alter the technical
(or perhaps non-technical) solution. The purely technical question you ask
the list, although you will eventually get an accurate answer, may not be the
question that you need to ask in order to make the user happy. People
reading the list aren't going to pick up on that without background.
Like you, I don't understand why Scott doesn't answer directly, but the
rationale seems obvious enough. If Sendmail won't obey a .forward in a
group or world writable directory (for fear that a trojan may executed
from that file), why should cron be less carefull? It seems like a
reasonable question. The security problem that sendmail is addressing
comes up only in the presence of a user error, but the same can be said
for cron. Indeed, by extension perhaps chmod should refuse to make
executable such a file, although it would be a nuisance for chmod to do
the obverse check (that there were no executable files in a directory
about to become world writable). It isn't something I would be prepared to
tell someone else they must or must not do this, but it is perhaps worth
thinking about costs and benefits.
Dan Feenberg
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