Mailing List Archive: Qmail: users

getpwnam() patch available (was Re: Hard coded UIDs revisited)

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pgf at foxharp

Feb 6, 1997, 12:18 PM

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getpwnam() patch available (was Re: Hard coded UIDs revisited)

> > What *are* our goals anyway? I think that's the real problem.
> > Various people have different unarticulated goals.
>
> I think most of "us" would like qmail not to go its own path in this
> area. When it wants to know the uid for a username, it should use
> getpwnam() at run time, just like every other program. Then Red Hat
> can determine what uids qmail uses the normal way: it can edit

i mentioned a few days ago that i had patched qmail to use getpwnam().
i've been running it this way for a few days now with no problems. (which
may only mean that someone has now broken in and robbed me blind, without
me even knowing. :-)

i've put them up for ftp at ftp://id.wing.net/pub/pgf/qmail. if you fetch
them, please do take the time to scan them for problems -- i'm sure others
out there have spent more time studying qmail internals than i have. i
think the changes are right (and i even tried to match the coding style
:-). but i'm happy to take suggestions/corrections and redo it, if it
seems like the patch will be long-lived.

one of my goals was to disturb the base (which was 0.96) as little as
possible, so i made use of macros to hide the bulk of the changes. the
Makefile has more changes than anything else.

(btw, the id.wing.net ftp server has an absurdly low user limit, so you
may have trouble getting in.)

russ, feel free to add a link from www.qmail.org if you'd like.

paul
---------------------
paul fox, pgf [at] foxharp (arlington, ma)

jcring at switch

Feb 6, 1997, 1:18 PM

Post #2 of 2 (534 views)
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Re: getpwnam() patch available (was Re: Hard coded UIDs revisited) [In reply to]

At 02:18 PM 2/6/97 -0500, Paul Fox wrote:
>>> What *are* our goals anyway? I think that's the real problem.
>>> Various people have different unarticulated goals.
>>
>> I think most of "us" would like qmail not to go its own path in this
>> area. When it wants to know the uid for a username, it should use
>> getpwnam() at run time, just like every other program. Then Red Hat
>> can determine what uids qmail uses the normal way: it can edit
>
>i mentioned a few days ago that i had patched qmail to use getpwnam().
>i've been running it this way for a few days now with no problems. (which
>may only mean that someone has now broken in and robbed me blind, without
>me even knowing. :-)

Hm, what's the chance that this patch, once looked over by people, can be
incorporated into the distrib. as an option? It appears many, for various
reasons, want/need this dynamic lookup option, and yet some (well, at least
me, anyway) are more concerned about the speed of QMAILthan the hassle of
dealing with hardcoded UIDs.

Of course, if this happens, will the next discussion be on which to make
the default :)
-------------------------
John C. Ring, Jr.
jcring [at] switch
Network Specialist
Union Switch & Signal Inc.

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