Re: [Exim] PAM for SMTP auth

Top Page
Delete this message
Reply to this message
Author: Philip Hazel
Date:  
To: Adrian Daminato
CC: exim-users
Subject: Re: [Exim] PAM for SMTP auth
On Mon, 7 Feb 2000, Adrian Daminato wrote:

> I managed to get it to work, to an extent. It was looking for the
> password for my exim user. I tried to seteuid at the point of the PAM
> calls, but it fails. I want to be able to run exim as it's own user,
> only taking root privileges as it needs - how to I get exim to become
> root, seteuid as the user authenticating, then go back to it's 'regular'
> user?


I'm afraid you cannot. Exim runs as "exim" when talking to remote hosts,
when configured as recommended with its own uid. All I can suggest is
that you somehow provide a setuid wrapper for PAM, but I don't know how
this could be done.

> How does
> exim regain root privileges when it needs them?


By re-execing itself. It only needs to do this to start a delivery
process after receiving a message.

-- 
Philip Hazel            University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@???      Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.