sendmail problems

[Paul Howarth]

Sharon Kimble wrote:
> ls -ld / /etc /etc/mail
> drwxr-xrwx  24 root root  4096 Jan  8 14:15 /
> drwxr-xr-x  96 root root 12288 Jan 11 14:30 /etc
> drwxr-xr-x   3 root root  4096 Jan 10 11:47 /etc/mail
> 
> To me it looks like the problem lies with / where it seems to be writable by
> 'others'. But how to change it I don't know, or if it should be changed
> even.

# chmod 755 /

What you should be worried about is how your system got into this state 
in the first place. Any ideas on how someone running as root could 
change the permissions of the root directory so that any regular user 
could create, delete and rename files there? For instance, on your 
system a regular user could run the command "mv /lib /trash" and 
completely break your system in a way that would be quite difficult to 
recover from.

Paul.