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<p>On 19/10/2014 13:39, Russ Allbery wrote:</p>
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<pre>Julien ÉLIE <<a href="mailto:julien@trigofacile.com">julien@trigofacile.com</a>> writes:</pre>
<blockquote type="cite" style="padding-left:5px; border-left:#1010ff 2px solid; margin-left:5px">In the rc.news man page, there is a BUGS section that mentions:</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" style="padding-left:5px; border-left:#1010ff 2px solid; margin-left:5px">"Running rc.news start as root is never the right thing to do, so we should at minimum check for this and error, or perhaps change effective user ID."</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" style="padding-left:5px; border-left:#1010ff 2px solid; margin-left:5px">I suggest to check whether rc.news is run as another user ID than the "news" user (in all cases, be it start or stop). If it is the case, we exit with the error:</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" style="padding-left:5px; border-left:#1010ff 2px solid; margin-left:5px">rc.news should be run as the "news" user</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" style="padding-left:5px; border-left:#1010ff 2px solid; margin-left:5px">where "news" is in fact the value of the runasuser keyword in inn.conf (the real news user). I don't think we should change effective user ID (if root). It might hide another issue. I don't think I ever said explicitly here, but I think it would be fine tochange users. However, that's rather hard to do safely. I suppose we</blockquote>
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<pre><br /><br />How can that be hard to do safely? Other software, far far far more popular and in much wider and heavier use has been doing it since adam was a boy, like apache's httpd, sendmail, postfix, dovecot, pureftpd, bind... the list goes on...<br /><br /></pre>
<pre>I think the issue here is rc.news is wrongly named, since most sys admins would see that and say, oh ok, that goes in (or links to) /etc/rc.d or /etc/<insert_your_os's_init_dir> and call it as rc.news start|stop|restart etc, but clearly this is however not what rc.news is for, requiring a wrapper to call it, change to user news before calling that script. It's also a PITA if something goes wrong, leaving all these sleeps and innwatches running since most sys admins would assume rc.news stop would actually stop everything, programmers sometimes need to think like sys admins, the ones who you rely on to install, configure, and use, your software :) <br /><br />Someone recently mentioned about time management in getting things running, usually if something doesn't work after an hour or two of effort from start to end-user usable, I piss it off and find something else that does, and I know I'm not alone in that mindset, since I consider anything that complex to get going would be a nightmare to problem solve should the need arise. So something that requires minimal fuss, would be used, recommended to others when asked for opinions, and the software becomes more popular as word of mouth helps propagate it, so basically making it as easy to use as possible will help the newbies, not frustrate them into using software X instead of yours.<br /><br /><br /></pre>
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