On Thu, Mar 14, 2019, at 12:09 PM, Yassine Chaouche via dovecot wrote:
On 3/14/19 9:55 AM, Patrick Cernko via dovecot wrote:
[...] the way we have configured exim, it neither needs reload or restart but reads the certificate file every time it has to use it.
What happens if you goof off in the middle of an opeartion, temporarily putting a wrong file instead of the new certificate, and exim starts delivering the new broken certificate right away ? or breaks ? or clients can't connect anymore with TLS ? or don't connect at all if you don't allow non-TLS connexions ?
Yassine.
Getting caught in the middle of a cert file or key file update should not happen -- a process that already opened a file will continue to be reading from that file, even if it gets renamed.
But what if exim (or some other process) happens to read the "old" certificate file - and then the "new" private key file (or vice versa)?
A race condition like this seems unlikely but technically possible.
-- K