The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Olivier Salaun - CRU <address@concealed>]

Hi Glenn,

This change of behavior in MhOnArc has mainly consequences on WWSympa
(when building HTML version of moderated messages) because the CGI is
running SetUID.
We do NOT have the problem you report with archived.pl though we use
Mhonarc 2.6.0 too. It might be because you are running Sympa on FreeBSD
(we run it in Linux RH) and FreeBSD seems to have a strange behavior
with setuid(). It looks like FreeBSD does not allow root processes to
change all their UIDs (effective UID + real UID + saved UID).

Unfortunately we don't have any FreeBSD for testing purpose. Can you
try this on your system :

1.    Determine all UIDs associated to your archived.pl process :        

• %ps xf -eo pid,ppid,uid,euid,fuid,fsuid,svuid,suid,ruid,ucmd
• 
  

  Try adding a POSIX setuid() around line 102 of archived.pl :

• &POSIX::setuid((getpwnam('--USER--'))[2]);

I think sympa-dev ML would be the best place to go on this thread...

Glenn Gillis wrote:
> This exit
> code appears to represent mhonarc exiting with a refusal to run 
> setuid/setgid. As of 2.6.0 mhonarc won't run setuid/setgid. From the
> 2.6.0 
> release notes: 
>   
> "Setuid/setgid execution causes mhonarc to terminate with an error. 
> Mhonarc does not pass taint checks, so we abort with an error that 
> setuid/setgid execution is not supported.  MHonArc is too insecure 
> for setuid operation and trying to make it setuid-safe would require 
> alot of work and potentially limit a large amount of functionality." 
>   
> Because archived.pl setuid/setgid's to "sympa" at startup, I guess this
> context 
> applies when archived.pl runs mhonarc. Commenting out the setuid/setgid
> lines 
> (102 & 103) in archived.pl and starting archived.pl directly by
> user "sympa" 
> seems to get around the problem. 
>   
> The easiest way to start a service as a non-root user under FreeBSD
> seems to be 
> as an entry in the user's crontab with "@reboot" instead of the normal
> time 
> entries, which runs the command at system startup. I'm not sure about
> other 
> flavors of *nix. Is anyone else out there successfully running sympa
> with 
> mhonarc >= 2.6.0? How did you configure  archived.pl to run? Does
> this seem like 
> a reasonable way to get this to work? 
>   
-- 
Olivier Salaun
Comite Reseau des Universites