Sendmail milters in Fedora 8

[Paul Howarth]

Since upgrading my mail server from Fedora 7 to Fedora 8, I've come 
across some problems with the sockets used for communication between 
sendmail and two of the "milter" plugins I'm using with it, namely 
milter-regex and spamass-milter. It's very likely that other milters 
will have similar issues.

The sockets used are created when the milter starts, as follows:

milter-regex:
/var/spool/milter-regex/sock (var_spool_t, inherited from parent directory)

spamass-milter:
/var/run/spamass-milter/spamass-milter.sock (spamd_var_run_t, in policy)

These are pretty well the upstream locations, though I'm open to moving 
the milter-regex socket from /var/spool to /var/run or elsewhere for 
consistency.

Since moving to Fedora 8, I've had to add the following to local policy 
to get these milters working:

allow sendmail_t spamd_var_run_t:dir { search getattr };
allow sendmail_t spamd_var_run_t:sock_file { getattr write };
allow sendmail_t var_spool_t:sock_file { getattr write };
allow sendmail_t initrc_t:unix_stream_socket { read write connectto };

The last of these is the strangest, and relates to Bug #425958 
(https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=425958). Whilst the socket 
file itself has the context listed above, the unix domain socket that 
sendmail connects to is still initrc_t, as can be seen from the output 
of "netstat -lpZ":

...
unix  2      [ ACC ]     STREAM     LISTENING     14142 
5853/spamass-milter system_u:system_r:initrc_t:s0 
/var/run/spamass-milter/spamass-milter.sock
unix  2      [ ACC ]     STREAM     LISTENING     13794 
5779/milter-regex   system_u:system_r:initrc_t:s0 
/var/spool/milter-regex/sock
...

So, my questions are:

1. Why are the sockets still initrc_t?
2. Is this a kernel issue or a userspace issue that should be fixed in 
the milters?
3. Should there be a standard place for milter sockets to live, and if 
so, where?
4. How come this worked OK in Fedora 7 and previous releases?

Paul.