Fedora 10 - Boot Analysis

[Les Mikesell]

Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 5:27 AM, Steve Grubb <sgrubb at redhat.com> wrote:
>> We ran into a problem doing the LSPP evaluation with regards to email. Of all
>> the packages listed, the only one that really mattered for security was cron.
>> So, what we did was patched cron to be able to take an argument, -m, to
>> define the mail delivery agent. It could be a shell script, procmail, or
>> anything you wanted to take the cron output and move it into the local spool
>> dir. Would using this solve the problems being debated here?  (And since cron
>> can take a mail agent argument, it should not have a hard requirement for
>> sendmail.)
> 
> How would you expose the option to use the argument for a local admin?
> Having them edit the service file in init.d seems inappropriate. Would
> you expose it in an etc/sysconfig/  file to be parsed at service
> script start?

That just seems like the wrong place to short-circuit an existing good 
general solution.  If you want root's mail to go somewhere else, use 
aliases or .procmailrc.  If you want to splat text onto a screen on the 
odd chance that someone who cares happens to be watching, add a program 
that takes a message on a pipe and does that, and use the existing 
mechanisms to run it.  Or add one that alerts for mailbox deliveries. 
But don't break the well-designed ability to send to multiple 
destinations, including local and non-local for the people who actually 
do want the messages.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com