Bug 532990 – stage3-amd64-20141204.tar.bz2 - /var/spool/mail should be owned by root:mail not root:root and writeable by group mail

• Product: Gentoo Release Media
• Status: RESOLVED OBSOLETE

[Description Toralf Förster 2014-12-18 23:22:59 UTC]

/me wonders about the permissions of the /var/spool/mail directory of a freshly installed amd64-hardened (did it few times now). I do use sendmail + mailx for local mail delivering. mailx complaints about wrong permissions of that directory. And it is right, the group is wrong and lacks write permissions. It follows the log :


tfoerste@t44 ~ $ mail
Mail version 8.1.2 01/15/2001.  Type ? for help.
"/var/mail/tfoerste": 1 message 1 new
>N  1 [e-mail]  Fri Dec 19 00:17   15/593   
& 1
Message 1:
From [e-mail] Fri Dec 19 00:17:22 2014
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2014 00:17:22 +0100
From: [e-mail]
To: [e-mail]

Fri Dec 19 00:17:22 CET 2014

& q
mail: Cannot create lockfile /var/mail/tfoerste.lock: Error creating temporary lockfile

tfoerste@t44 ~ $ ls -ld /var/mail
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 15 Dec  7 23:07 /var/mail -> /var/spool/mail

tfoerste@t44 ~ $ ls -ld /var/spool/mail
drwxr-xr-x 1 mail root 74 Dec 19 00:17 /var/spool/mail

tfoerste@t44 ~ $ sudo chgrp mail /var/spool/mail

tfoerste@t44 ~ $ mail
Mail version 8.1.2 01/15/2001.  Type ? for help.
"/var/mail/tfoerste": 1 message 1 new
>N  1 [e-mail]  Fri Dec 19 00:17   15/593   
& 1
Message 1:
From [e-mail] Fri Dec 19 00:17:22 2014
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2014 00:17:22 +0100
From: [e-mail]
To: [e-mail]

Fri Dec 19 00:17:22 CET 2014

& q
mail: Cannot create lockfile /var/mail/tfoerste.lock: Error creating temporary lockfile

tfoerste@t44 ~ $ ls -ld /var/spool/mail
drwxr-xr-x 1 mail mail 74 Dec 19 00:17 /var/spool/mail

tfoerste@t44 ~ $ sudo chmod g+w /var/spool/mail

tfoerste@t44 ~ $ mail
Mail version 8.1.2 01/15/2001.  Type ? for help.
"/var/mail/tfoerste": 1 message 1 new
>N  1 [e-mail]  Fri Dec 19 00:17   15/593   
& 1   
Message 1:
From [e-mail] Fri Dec 19 00:17:22 2014
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2014 00:17:22 +0100
From: [e-mail]
To: [e-mail]

Fri Dec 19 00:17:22 CET 2014

& q
Saved 1 message in /home/tfoerste/mbox

tfoerste@t44 ~ $ ls -ld /var/spool/mail
drwxrwxr-x 1 mail mail 74 Dec 19 00:18 /var/spool/mail

[Comment 1 Jeroen Roovers (RETIRED) 2014-12-19 07:18:03 UTC]

Which stage3 image is that? The filename should give a clue.

[Comment 2 Toralf Förster 2014-12-19 11:19:37 UTC]

(In reply to Jeroen Roovers from comment #1)
> Which stage3 image is that? The filename should give a clue.

it was an stable amd64/autobuilds/current-iso/stage3-amd64-20141204.tar.bz2

from beginning of this week

[Comment 3 Jeroen Roovers (RETIRED) 2014-12-19 14:01:21 UTC]

net-mail/mailbase-1.1 is stable and like -1 sets ownership to root:mail as expected. So the autobuild system is somehow changing this?

[Comment 4 Ryan Twitchell 2015-01-03 18:45:17 UTC]

After a clean amd64 (not hardened) install today, I got the usual warning about /var/spool/mail permissions not being what mailbase wants.  I found the permissions to be even different than first described in this bug:

localhost ~ # ls -l /var/spool/
total 4
drwxr-xr-x. 2 mail root 4096 Jan  3 11:56 mail


Yup.  In addition to differing permissions, that's mail user and root group instead of the reverse.  I believe I used the 2014-12-28 stage 3.

[Comment 5 Jorge Manuel B. S. Vicetto (RETIRED) 2016-11-12 18:30:14 UTC]

I don't know what happened here and I find it unlikely that any permissions issue was caused by the release tools as we rely in the tree packages / portage to create the dirs.

In any case, I can't confirm this issue with the latest stages, so I'm closing as OBSOLETE.

<user>@nightheron ~ $ tar tjvf /release/buildroot/amd64-dev/builds/default/stage3-amd64-20161110.tar.bz2 | grep /var/spool
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2016-11-10 01:30 ./var/spool/
-rw-r--r-- root/root         0 2016-11-10 01:30 ./var/spool/.keep
<user>@nightheron ~ $ tar tjvf /release/buildroot/amd64-dev/builds/hardened/stage3-amd64-hardened-20161103.tar.bz2 | grep /var/spool
drwxr-xr-x root/root           0 2016-11-03 18:42 ./var/spool/
-rw-r--r-- root/root           0 2016-11-03 18:42 ./var/spool/.keep