New sendmail and missing /usr/lib/sendmail

[Eric Rostetter]

Quoting Michal Jaegermann <michal at harddata.com>:

> On Sat, Mar 25, 2006 at 10:24:12AM -0500, David Eisner wrote:
>> Eric Rostetter wrote:
>> >This sounds like what happens when we rush the QA processes...
>>
>> Other distros had advance warning about this vulnerability, and hence
>> more time to apply patches and do testing.
>
> Personally I _hugely_ prefer fixed packages with minor packaging
> imperfections, which BTW can be trivially fixed by whomever is
> installing them by adding a link or two, then waiting for something
> which installs without a hitch and have a mail server "owned" in the
> meantime.  Headaches in both cases do not even start to compare.

Then you should install from updates-testing for your machines to
accomplish that.

Not everyone runing linux knows how to create the proper links, or
perhaps even how to create a symlink at all.

It actually amazes me that no one has suggested runing the proper
alternatives command to fix this, and no one has researched if
that fixes the problem, rather than suggesting that we manually
create the links.

> I think that everybody should send Jesse big thanks for preparing
> new packages on such short notice.

He didn't rush them, at his decision.  So if anything you would ask
why he didn't rush them, as he considered it not to be an important
vulnerability.  Why do I say this?  Because that is what Jesse says
in bugzilla about it.

>  "New-and-improved", which create
> all needed links automatically on an installation, can be issued
> later.

That doesn't help those who had their mail disabled for hours or days
in the meantime.

> Of course it would help if people experiencing problems
> would try to identify what went wrong (older 'alternatives' do not
> work like they should?, some typos in %post scripts?, something
> else?).  Again, look at what 'rpm -q --scripts sendmail' reports
> and check is something is amiss there, as the first step, if you
> have seen troubles.

I've looked into it, and can't find any reason for the missing symlinks.
In fact, I've not had a system with missing symlinks yet.  But, I did
have some systems that lost their custom sendmail.{mc,cf} files, which
is rather unrelated to the symlink issue.

>    Michal

-- 
Eric Rostetter
The Department of Physics
The University of Texas at Austin

Go Longhorns!