What is a VDHL document (text/x-vdhl)

[John Horne]

On Sat, 2008-12-13 at 16:09 +0100, M. Fioretti wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 13, 2008 12:30:46 PM +0100, Chitlesh GOORAH wrote:
> > > With the installation of rkhunter-1.3.2-5.fc10.noarch, my Daily Run
> > > email (generated by cron) is being sent as a VDHL document (text/x-
> > > vdhl).  The script is sending the output of rkhunter with /bin/mail.
> > >
> > > Can anyone say what a VDHL doc is and how one opens it?
> > >
> > Hello Geoffrey,
> > 
> > VHDL is a hardware description language used to design chips/FPGA.
> 
> yes, but:
> 
> 1) the OP said vdhl, not vhdl
> 2) why should a rootkit hunter generate hardware description languages
>    as a report?
> 
It isn't. This problem was recently reported to the rkhunter users list.
The problem is the Fedora package contains a cron job to run rkhunter.
That job, however, should have included an option (for cron jobs) which
suppresses certain console character codes (makes pretty colours on the
console output). The output from the rkhunter cron job is emailed to the
root user, and when the mailer sees those odd character codes it
generates the vdhl mime type.

As far as I am aware this has been reported to the fedora rkhunter
packager as a bug.



John.

-- 
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John Horne, University of Plymouth, UK  Tel: +44 (0)1752 587287
E-mail: John.Horne at plymouth.ac.uk       Fax: +44 (0)1752 587001