Hi,
I'm running debian stable on my machines, and I've noticed that when
one of my scripts sends email, I get a spurious and unexplained
"Permission denied" error:
2020-04-27 20:36:15 1jT9Y7-0003B4-Mf <= patchd@??? U=patchd P=local S=1535
2020-04-27 20:36:15 1jT9Y7-0003B4-Mf H=pandora.armlinux.org.uk [xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:214:fdff:fe10:1be6] Permission denied
2020-04-27 20:36:17 1jT9Y7-0003B4-Mf => user@??? R=smart_route T=remote_smtp H=pandora.armlinux.org.uk [xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:214:fdff:fe10:1be6] X=TLS1.2:ECDHE_RSA_AES_256_GCM_SHA384:256 CV=yes A=fixed_cram C="250 OK id=1jT9Y8-0004ff-Qf"
My guess is that there is some file that exim can't access while
attempting to send to pandora, but I think working out what is
going to be very hard (I guess debug isn't allowed from non-root
users?)
Sure enough, trying it results in:
exim: debugging permission denied
However, there's a general principle of error reporting here:
shouldn't error messages contain some hint as to what is being
done when the error was encountered? Given that -d+all can't
be used in this case, and the binary can't be straced (because
it's set-uid), IMHO the only way to track this down is for that
general principle to be adhered to by the exim code base.
As this doesn't seem to be causing a problem, it's not something
I care about, but I thought I would bring it to people's attention.
Thanks.
--
Russell King
