Bug 53641

Summary:	mailman code in /var requires setgid
Product:	[Retired] Red Hat Linux	Reporter:	ratness
Component:	mailman	Assignee:	John Dennis <jdennis>
Status:	CLOSED UPSTREAM	QA Contact:
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	9	Keywords:	FutureFeature
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	i386
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Enhancement
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2004-06-06 09:50:02 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description ratness 2001-09-13 18:56:41 UTC

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0)

Description of problem:
If you make /var mount nosuid, mailman's web front end doesn't work.  
Making /var nosuid is a fairly reasonable thing, in my book.  The error 
messages from this are really cryptic and can take a while to decipher.  I 
know I deserve to lose in this situation.  The enhancement request I have 
would be: could you get the developers to consider this case and make a 
smarter error message if it can't succeed in the setgid, especially in 
the 'check_perms' executable, OR, could you the packager install the 
binaries in some place other than /var?

No pressure, and thanks for your time.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):


How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. edit /etc/fstab and add 'nosuid' to /var
2. mount -o remount /var
3. Try to use mailman's web interface.

Actual Results:  A fatal 'permission denied' error drops into mailman's 
VirtualHost's error log.

Expected Results:  I'd've expected the error to complain more about "can't 
setgid to MAILMAN_GID" than that it can't write to /var/mailman/logs/error.

Additional info:

Comment 1 Florian La Roche 2004-06-06 09:50:02 UTC

For a nosuid /var you probably want to move /var/mailman onto
another partition and symlink it to /var/mailman.

Bad error messages are a problem, but also not really a bug in
the current package. Closing this to upstream development.

greetings,

Florian La Roche