Re: [exim] Spurious permission denied error

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Author: Andrew C Aitchison
Date:  
To: Russell King
CC: exim-users
Subject: Re: [exim] Spurious permission denied error
On Tue, 28 Apr 2020, Russell King via Exim-users wrote:

> On Mon, Apr 27, 2020 at 09:11:18PM +0100, Jeremy Harris via Exim-users wrote:
>> On 27/04/2020 20:52, Russell King via Exim-users wrote:
>>> I'm running debian stable on my machines, and I've noticed that when
>>> one of my scripts sends email,
>>
>> I'm hoping that means you can trigger it on demsnd?
>
> I believe so - exim is being called from a perl script running as the
> user stated in the log line thusly:
>
>     /usr/sbin/sendmail -oi -t

>
>>> I get a spurious and unexplained
>>> "Permission denied" error:


Does changing that to
     /usr/sbin/sendmail -oi -t -v
give you any clues ?


"exim -v" doesnt give as much information as "exim -d" but should
be available as any user.

> The protection on setuid processes means that while you can do this:
>
>        strace /usr/sbin/sendmail -oi -t

>
> as an unprivileged user, the process will no longer be executed setuid,
> and it definitely will not be able to access a bunch of files (such as
> those giving it the credentials for the smarthost.)


The output of
         strace -f -eopen,openat -o /tmp/exim.strace /usr/sbin/sendmail -oi -t
should be small and include the name of the file that cannot be read
(unless there is another unreadable file that stops exim reaching the 
problem access).


-- 
Andrew C. Aitchison                    Kendal, UK
             andrew@???