Package: alpine
Version: 2.11+dfsg1-3
Severity: normal
A user reported that alpine had suddenly started saying things about
rsh to IMAP server, and prompting for a password but not accepting any
input... Rather than opening her inbox.
Investigation showed that alpine was running:
26465 pts/9 S+ 0:00 /usr/bin/rsh localhost -l anna exec /etc/rimapd
alpine was configured to use imap for the inbox (due to lack of maildir
support):
inbox-path={localhost/novalidate-cert}inbox
Apparently apine defaults to trying to use rsh (really ssh) to connect
in this situation. If the server doesn't support ssh password logins,
the attempt fails and it goes on to try a regular imap connection, with
only some ssh connection overhead. However, if the server allows ssh
password logins, ssh prompts for a password. It's been many years since
I used real rsh, but I think it never involved a password prompt (why
should it, it had no security and bell bottoms were still in fashion),
so it's quite possible that the code in alpine that runs it does not
connect up the tty, or that pine and rsh are fighting over console
input.
In any case, this seems like a really stupid thing to do when the mail
client has been configured to use imap. Doubly so when the imap server
it's trying to log into is localhost, which would make this rsh a no-op
even if it somehow succeeded. Trebly so given that a /etc/rimapd command
has not existed on any Unix system since, appoximately, 1984. (Let alone
in Debian, which doesn't even contain a rimapd command!)
The workaround is this:
inbox-path={localhost/novalidate-cert/NoRsh}inbox
Rather than letting each user stumble over this long-forgotten land
mine, I recpectfully suggest that it be dealt with by making this rsh
nonsense be compiled out.
(Note: It's possible that this user has some setting in .pinerc that
enables this behavior. I didn't see anything that leapt out at me
though.)
-- System Information:
Debian Release: jessie/sid
APT prefers unstable
APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Kernel: Linux 3.14-1-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Versions of packages alpine depends on:
ii libc6 2.19-10
ii libgssapi-krb5-2 1.12.1+dfsg-9
ii libkrb5-3 1.12.1+dfsg-9
ii libldap-2.4-2 2.4.39-1.1+b1
ii libpam0g 1.1.8-3.1
ii libssl1.0.0 1.0.1i-2
ii libtinfo5 5.9+20140712-2
ii mlock 8:2007f~dfsg-2
Versions of packages alpine recommends:
ii alpine-doc 2.11+dfsg1-3
Versions of packages alpine suggests:
ii aspell 0.60.7~20110707-1.1
ii postfix [mail-transport-agent] 2.11.1-1
-- no debconf information
--
see shy jo
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