Future: fhs 2.3 compliance for fc3

Havoc Pennington hp at redhat.com
Fri Apr 2 05:22:02 UTC 2004


On Thu, 2004-04-01 at 20:52, Chris Adams wrote:
> Once upon a time, Jeremy Katz <katzj at redhat.com> said:
> > Heh, that's just sick.  How about my statement holding for when the
> > clients are set up correctly? :-)  (ie, if you don't use local sendmail
> > and just do smtp, then local /var/spool isn't needed)
> 
> Way too many programs expect to be able to call /usr/sbin/sendmail to
> assume everything will use SMTP.  And really, that is how it should be;
> why should every program be required to have an SMTP client built-in?
> 
> The nice thing about that is that you are pretty much guaranteed that
> you can send mail at any time, even if the network is down.  Sendmail
> (or another local mailer) will queue the mail locally and send it when
> it can.  It is not a good idea to have things like cron jobs get stuck
> or lose their output because a remote SMTP server was unreachable.

I think we have to assume that a managed read-only OS image sort of
deployment would have some limitations in possible configurations and
what apps could do. After all the whole point is to lock things down.

One setup would be that each user has an outgoing mail queue in their
home directory, since homedir already has to be writeable by the user
and gets backed up and so forth. Surely you could provide a
/usr/sbin/sendmail that worked this way.

A queue in /var is suboptimal because it partially defeats the purpose
of the deployment model - it leaves per-machine state to be corrupted,
backed up, hacked, etc.

Havoc






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