Henri J. Schlereth writes:
> the man pages dont install unless I missed a step
They should be in /var/qmail/man. man won't know to look there unless
you put it in $MANPATH or (in my case, I don't know how portable this
is) in `/etc/man.config'.
> why is this a security issue?
Simply because doing things as root is dangerous, and mail delivery
has no real need for special privileges.
> why then can I defeat it by having a .qmail that forwards to root on
> another system?
You can defeat it much more easily than that, if I'm not mistaken. Put:
=root:root:0:0:/:::
in users/assign. (man qmail-users for details.)
> I have worked as a sysadmin for a while and have always gotten
> root mail alerts and notifications, when machines are down,
> when someone tries to crack in to a system all bells and
> alarms go off, email and pager messages to root.
Don't confuse the local address `root' with the username `root'. The
address `root' should go to the machine's administrator, yes. But it
hardly needs to be done with uid 0.
paul
