[techtalk] Hi.I'm new.Postfix/mail server questions...

[Mary Gardiner]

On Tue, May 22, 2001 at 09:46:47AM +1200, Penguina wrote:
> Yikes!  A script that echos?  How can you be absolutely sure
> it runs as the correct user and group, and always exits
> in exactly the same way, always returning the same value
> (even if the user repeatedly types ctrl-C's and such at
> the 'null' shell script).  How can you be sure you're
> invoking a shell who's "echo" has no known buffer overflow?

At the same time, some boxes probably do need to have a message to let people
know they can't have shell when they log in.

For instance, when using sourceforge, you need to ssh to your account once
to create you home directory - it would require additional WARNINGs on the
web page if it was going to silently throw you out, because it would appear
not to have worked.

Another case is at my university, where you lose your computer science
account if you've ceased to be enrolled... except if they make a mistake, and
you still are enrolled.

It is much better to get a message saying 'you have lost your account, please
see so and so if this is a mistake,' than attempt to deal with teaching staff
and admin who aren't aware of the details of account deletion, and will simply
pass you to another random person.

Is it then better to write a script, or for me to do it myself in C, when I'm
not a terribly experienced C programmer, especially wrt the UNIX interfaces to
uids, and signals, and have never really had to write anything that avoids
overruns?

Or should every admin know C?

Mary.

-- 
Mary Gardiner
<mary at puzzling.org>
GPG Key ID: 77625870