On Thu, Jan 27, 2000 at 08:07:28PM -0800, Stig Hackvän wrote:
>
> is it reasonable to use the shell field of the password database to permit or deny
> shell access to a username. qmail should respect this.
The problem, as I see it, is that qmail is more flexible than e.g. sendmail
and not only uses the regular passwd db /etc/passwd to get the users
homedir. This means that all users may not even have an regular "account" on
the machine which is actually does the receiving/delivering pert of the MT
process.
What could be done is, however is to patch qmail-local to honour (i.e. let
them override the default "/bin/sh") the shells in /etc/passwd for those
users that actually _have_ regular accounts. For really paranoid
implementations, this patch could be made to DENY (default to /bin/false)
shell for those who lack shell in /etc/passwd.
One question arise: Is there ANY security issues WHATSOEVER to use the shell
defined in /etc/passwd? Only root should be able to change /etc/passwd. So
if root assignes a cracked shell to a user, then this is not a problem in
qmail-land?
I leave the patching as an exercise to the reader.
/magnus
--
http://x42.com/
