Re: Exim

[Corinna Vinschen <vinschen at redhat dot com>]

On Mon, Aug 26, 2002 at 10:56:39AM -0400, Pierre A. Humblet wrote:
> > > I would prefer var/spool/exim...
> 
> OK, I have no preferences. I was just trying to follow the instructions
> from the Cygwin web:
> --localstatedir=/var
> That makes a lot of sense to me. /var/exim denotes the fact that the files
> under it are private to exim, which is the case.
> /var/spool/exim looks more like shared files.

What files are in there?  Just private stuff to exim?  Where is that
stuff on Linux systems, typically?

> > >> var/exim/log/
> > 
> > > and var/log/exim (or var/spool/exim/log) to follow the RPM conventions
> > > that I found on rpmfind.net.
> > 
> > The first, please.
> 
> cygrunsrv will save stdout in /var/log/exim.log, which could cause confusion
> with /var/log/exim. So I prefer the second (or /var/exim/log).

Hmm, I'd prefer logs being in /var/log.  I don't think there's much
of confusion to store exim logs in a /var/log/exim dir.  I'd also
put the cygrunsrv output under that dir, using the appropriate 
option in the install script.

> Nobody said anything about the mail spool directory (where the user mboxes are):
> /var/mail (and not /var/spool/mail). Is that OK (it's under user control anyway)?
> Isn't /var/mail the mutt default?

Nope, it's /var/spool/mail and I'd think /var/spool/mqueue is the name
of the sendmail queue on Linux.  I don't know the default for exim on
Linux boxes but something in /var/spool is the way to go, IMHO.

> I am very reluctant to have an automatic script create groups or users without
> any warning. On the other hand having that in a user-run script such as 
> /bin/ssh-host-config is OK.

Yep.

> The difficulty is that there are many ways to operate a mailer. For example
> when ntsec is off, nothing special needs to be done.
> Even when ntsec is on, I don't think it is necessary to create users or 
> groups to operate securely, even if it's traditional to do so.
> To minimize the support effort it may be wise to set all permissions to 777
> by default and let users tighten them if desired. Even that may be paranoid,
> I don't expect users to write to the list simply because they have a 
> permission problem. Exim provides good feedback on that.

That's a point.  I think it should be up to you as the maintainer.
However, the script could ask the installing person how to do things
as I did it in ssh-host-config with the usage of PrivSep and then
it could be convenient to ask if a user should be created.  However,
that's definitely not a prerequisite for the first version.

Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Developer                                mailto:cygwin@cygwin.com
Red Hat, Inc.