Bug#373786: /etc/cron.daily/exim4-base should unset TMPDIR

[Marc Haber]

On Mon, Oct 02, 2006 at 12:58:44PM +0200, Tollef Fog Heen wrote:
> Marc Haber skrev:
> >On Tue, Jul 04, 2006 at 04:24:33PM +0200, Marc Haber wrote:
> >>On Mon, Jul 03, 2006 at 03:41:47PM +0200, Tollef Fog Heen wrote:
> >>>* Marc Haber 
> >>>| >It's probably not a security problem, though, as in it'll still be
> >>>| >better than using /tmp as $TMP{,DIR}.
> >>>| 
> >>>| Is there any better possibility to solve the issue at hand?
> >>>
> >>>Using su - instead of --chuid, might work.  It's not pretty, though.
> >>Ok. So I need to first learn why start-stop-daemon was used here in
> >>the first place.
> >
> >After investigating, it looks like start-stop-daemon was used over su
> >to avoid a syslog message from being written.
> 
> What's the harm in a syslog message?

Search the Web for newbies asking who has changed from root to nobody
during the daily cron job. exim4 is installed by default. Go figure.

> >As there is still #376165 and it is unlikely to have this fixed for
> >etch, I'd like to locall work around this issue. Is there any way to
> >programmatically find out whether libpam-tmpdir is in use to have the
> >cron job fall back to su in this case?
> 
> You probably rather want to check if TMP and TMPDIR are writable, and if 
> not reset them to /tmp or similar.

Good idea.

Greetings
Marc

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