[Dovecot] permissions warning on OpenBSD 3.9

Thomas Zajic zlatko at zlatko.fdns.net
Tue Aug 1 10:58:33 EEST 2006


* J Moore, 2006-08-01 07:49

> At startup I get the following warning:
> "Warning: Fixing permissions of /var/dovecot to be world-readable."
> 
> Q: Is this something that I can/should fix, or can it be safely ignored?

You usually should only see this once, after that dovecot is supposed to
fix it by itself, provided that it has sufficient privileges to do so.
What user is dovecot running as, and what's the owner and permission
settings of /var/dovecot?

BTW, while we're at it (this one's for Timo, I guess ;-) - is there a
specific reason why this check is done via lstat() rather than via plain
ol' stat() (see src/master/master-settings.c, line# 784)?

I'm using GNU stow, so /usr/local/var/run/dovecot is actually a symlink
to /usr/local/stow/dovecot-data/var/run/dovecot - which, in fact, does
have the proper permissions (dovecot:dovecot, 0755) already. Yet I'm
still getting this warning everytime dovecot starts up, because lstat()
returns the permissions  of the symlink (0777) rather than those of the
target (0755). "Fixing" it with chmod() in line# 798 doesn't actually fix
it, of course, because chmod(), as opposed to lstat(), affects the link
target rather than the link itself.

Just curious ...

Thomas
-- 
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- Thomas "ZlatkO" Zajic  <zlatko at gmx.at>   Linux-2.6.17 & Thunderbird-1.5 -
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