I could use a little explanation on this issue.

I was checking my system for world-writable files, and found lots of

data/bounce-events-?????.pck that are world-writable:

imacat@rinse ~ % ls -lt /var/lib/mailman/data | grep 'rw. ' -rw-rw-rw- 1 list list 0 2006-01-31 01:26 bounce-events-02258.pck -rw-rw-rw- 1 list list 4786 2005-12-26 17:36 bounce-events-26086.pck ... imacat@rinse ~ %

I felt weird, so I looked into the mailman 2.1.7 source, and found

such lines in bin/mailmanctl:

line 421-422 # Clear our file mode creation umask os.umask(0)

I checked the umask when running the init script (copied from

scripts/mailman) on boot, inserted "touch /var/tmp/mailman.umask.test" and reboot. The result is sane, but a new world-writable bounce-events-?????.pck was created altogeter. Apparently bin/mailmanctl did not inherit the umask from its parent init script:

imacat@rinse ~ % ls -l /var/tmp/mailman.umask.test -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 2006-02-02 02:52 /var/tmp/mailman.umask.test imacat@rinse ~ % ls -l /var/lib/mailman/data/bounce-events-*.pck -rw-rw-rw- 1 list list 0 2006-02-02 02:41 /var/lib/mailman/data/bounce-events-02211.pck imacat@rinse ~ %

I searched the archive.  I know that these long-gone

data/bouce-events-?????.pck can be safely removed. But I'm a little worried about this "world-writable" thing. Is it intended? Mark told me these files are safe. That's fine. But I still find it confusing:

 1. Even if they are safe, it'll still create confusion when someone

tries to dump them for debugging purpose, if tempered.

 2. Even if they are safe, will other files created by

bin/mailmanctl, may be accidently, be world-writable, too?

 3. Will other processes raised by bin/mailmanctl, may be accidently,

inherit this umask and create world-writable files on surprise, too?

 4. Finally, is that necessary to clear the umask to 0?

I'm not quite familiar with python, so forgive me if I didn't send any

patch on this. It may not be appropriate, either, for the whole umask operation seems to be quite complicated in bin/mailmanctl and an improper patch may ruin it.

On Wed, 1 Feb 2006 14:13:25 -0800 Mark Sapiro <msapiro@value.net> wrote:

imacat wrote:

...

I noted that in the source of mailman 2.1.7 there are 2 lines in bin/mailmanctl:

line 421-422 # Clear our file mode creation umask os.umask(0)

Is this intended? Is it the reason why data/bounce-events-?????.pck are world-writable?

It looks like you're right. I don't know if there is/was a good reason or not. I'm cross posting this reply to Mailman-Developers. Maybe someone there knows the reason for this.

Note that many places in the Mailman code, umask is saved and set for a particular purpose and then restored, but BounceRunner doesn't do this when creating the bounce-events-*.pck. I don't know why.

-- Best regards, imacat ^_*' <imacat@mail.imacat.idv.tw> PGP Key: http://www.imacat.idv.tw/me/pgpkey.txt

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