auth smtp and pam.d

[Gerry Doris]

>
> is this related to the smrsh? I think my sendmail is still running as
> root...
>
> root      5165  0.0  0.6  3820  860 ?        S    Oct13   0:00 sendmail:
>  accepti
>
> I am not following all the instructions in the sxs yet. smrsh is not as
> trivial as it looks for newbies like me.
>
>> authinfo (I'm going from memory here) no longer works.  It been
>> replaced by a tag with similar data in the access database.  The
>> access directive has new parameters.  Also, sendmail can't access the
>> /etc/sasldb file since only root has permission to do that.  Changing
>> the permission causes complaints that the file has wrong permissions.
>> You can work around this by including a DontBlameSendmail directive in
>> sendmail.mc.
>>
>

If you're still running sendmail as root then you have an older version of
sendmail.  The newer ones have changed this to a non root user for
security reasons.  If a hacker is able to cause a buffer overflow on a
root owned process and take over then they're now running as
root...obviously not a good thing!

Redhat 8.0 uses a non root sendmail.  Redhat 7.3 didn't.  All of this is
documented either on the sendmail.org site or (on a Redhat system) in
/usr/shared/doc/sendmail*/README.cf.  The newer sendmails also have made
the other minor changes I mentioned (minor if you know about them -
serious if you don't).  For instance, sendmail.cf is now in /etc/mail
instead of /etc.

Gerry