[Techtalk] spam filters again

Conor Daly conor.daly-linuxchix at cod.homelinux.org
Mon Nov 13 12:11:22 UTC 2006


On Mon, Nov 13, 2006 at 02:48:02AM -0800 or so it is rumoured hereabouts, 
Maria McKinley thought:
> 
> If you're not doing per-user configs, create yourself a spamd user, and 
> pass that to spamd's -u, then use that user for your sa-learning, and 
> housing your user_prefs, etc.
> 
> But, I'm not really sure what it means to pass that to spamd's -u, or 
> what he is talking about re:user_prefs.
> 
> I am running this with postfix, and it is on debian.

I'm not sure if postfix starts spamd or if it is started by init at system
startup.  If postfix starts spamd, then you'll need to look at
/etc/postfix/<something.conf> for the call to spamd.  Otherwise, you need
to look at /etc/init.d/spamd (or something similar (I'm not sure where
debian keeps the init scripts)).  

In either case, you need to locate the line that reads something like:

spamd -u nobody .....

and change nobody to the spamd user.  It might be at the line where spamd
is run or it might be elsewhere where some environment variable is set.
eg.

SPAMD_SWITCHES="-u nobody -r -autolearn..."

I'm not sure exactly why changing from user nobody might help apart from
the fact that user nobody is about as unprivileged as a user can get.  You
might want more relaxed permissions somewhere but not want user nobody to
have such privileges.

Conor (clear as mud...)
-- 
Conor Daly <conor.daly at cod.homelinux.org>
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GCS/G/S/O d+(-) s:+ a+ C++(+) UL++++ US++ P>++ L+++>++++ E--- W++ !N
PS+ PE Y+ PGP? tv(-) b+++(+) G e+++(*) h-- r+++ z++++ 
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
http://www.geekcode.com/ http://www.ebb.org/ungeek/


More information about the Techtalk mailing list