Hi, List,
Firstly I am a happy exim user. Exim4 really has a lot
of powerful features! Thanks go to Philip and other
developers.
Okey this issue was originally because the debian
maintainer's chose "Debian-exim" as the running user
and group for exim daemon. At the time (woody->sarge
upgrade and exim3 to exim4 transaction), there were a
lot of complains (about the ulgy choice, about the
username longer than 8 charaters and ps/top outputs
being truncated, etc, etc, etc). Some people argued
that the Debian mainteiner was trying to solve the
proplem he created himself (namely a username being
taken over by a system daemon). The rest became
history and "Debian-exim" was settled down.
For this one, myy own trick has always been to create
a "exim" user/group which has exactly the same uid/gid
as the "Debian-exim" user/group. This has been working
well so far.
But it is not ideal. And hence comes this post.
I am wondering if exim code can be changed so that the
running user/group will not be compiled into the
binary, instead the running user/group can be picked
up from a configuration file. I am sure the current
exim choice is about security. But apache, the web
server, does this exactly, i.e., switching to the
user/group specified in the configuration file after
initialised by root. If apache can do this, why exim
can not?
I am just asking a question here, not trying to
challenge, ;)
I mean, that will give slightly more flexibility to
exim and the debian choice of exim user/group would be
a non-issue in the first place.
I am not an exim developer, so sorry if I sounds lack
of understanding of this issue.
Thanks, and happy Easter!
J
--
My weblog
http://openunion.blogspot.com/
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