Re: alternatives to ETRN

[Matti Aarnio <mea@nic.funet.fi>]

> > > Although, I think that a small program that would do
> > > the same thing as ETRN command could be useful.
> 
> >      Yes, perhaps.
> >      Although my primary intention has been that each customer
> >      does something like this:
> > 
> >           echo "ETRN my.domain.name" | telnet smtp.isp smtp
> >      or:     (echo "ETRN my.domain.name";sleep 2) | telnet smtp.isp smtp
> 
> Heh-heh, the people who need to initiate queue run usually do not
> have telnet capable of reading stdin or fancy shell ;-)))

	Really ? (2 minutes of wondering..)  Oh, the MicroSoft universe....
	I got to brew my morning tea to get back to speed...

	For those users the utility at  transports/smtp/mprobe.c
	does not help either.  (I refer to it as basis for doing
	ETRN sender...)

	Perhaps such users can do some (what they were called?)
	shortcut (?) to run a finger client.  Yep..

> >      However, have you seen any SUID-anything programs in the
> >      ZMailer suite ?   Care to guess if I want to add any ?
> 
> I'd rather care to guess if you are planning to make all programs
> (except smtpserver and mailbox) run as non-root :-)  And my guess
> is: you are not ;-)

	The smtpserver can work without being root -- after it
	has created the listen socket, it actually turns itself
	into ``daemon''.   Except for doing ETRN support it does
	need to become root, because the control message is sent
	straight to the scheduler and the POSTOFFICE/transport/
	directory is owned by root with protection 755 ...

	Perhaps I need to write such a utility program, however
	I don't have any good ideas on how it could be invoked
	from fingerd, for example.

	Easy initial version could be a shell script run from
	under the fringerd thru some wrapper that collects the
	parameter, then:

		#!/bin/sh
		( cat << EOF
		ETRN $1
		QUIT
		EOF
		sleep 2) | telnet 127.0.0.1 smtp


> Eugene

/Matti Aarnio