Re: [logs] log review policies

From: Marcus J. Ranum (mjrat_private)
Date: Wed Oct 17 2001 - 14:59:27 PDT

  • Next message: Marcus J. Ranum: "[logs] mailers (was Re: [logs] log review policies)"

    Hal Snyder wrote:
    >Sounds good. I enjoy reading any mjr code - even TinyMUD. :)
    
    I never wrote any of TinyMUD; that was some truly skanky code. ;)
    I wrote UberMUD and UnterMUD - they were a bit prettier inside and a
    lot more reliable.
    
    Anyhow, I always enjoy having people read and laugh at my code. :) Last
    time I posted code, I offered to buy a pint for everyone who found a bug
    (it was only about 4 pages) - I wound up owing Mudge 5 pints. In retrospect,
    I completely screwed Mudge; these days he charges $18,822,392 to do a
    code review, and I got one for a measly $40 bar tab! :)
    
    I'll clean it up and post something here when I have a tarball on my
    site.
    
    
    >FWIW, whenever we have decided not to turn on sendmail/postfix/qmail/...
    >on a box, we ended up adding it later for one of two reasons:
    >
    >1. If mail can't be sent right away, what to do about flushing the
    >spool? Yes, you *could* have a cron task, but the major MTAs have
    >retry logic worked out already - why redo?
    
    The reason to redo is because the major MTAs have the retry logic
    but it's joined at the hip to a major codebase that runs with privs,
    knows how to execute arbitrary code, and is insanely complex. :)
    Other than that, hey, I dunno. :)  I wrote my minimailer less for
    security reasons than because I didn't want to have to have something
    as big as sendmail in the memory footprint I was working with for this
    little appliance doo-dad I was once working on. It was less a security issue
    than a code-size issue.
    
    >2. Some old code has SMTP sessions to localhost wired into its
    >reporting system. So we can't count on just piping to stand-alone
    >SMTP clients that originate remote sessions.
    
    Well, that's broken, isn't it?
    The way to fix broken code is not, traditionally, to break more code; it's
    to fix the broken code. ;)
    
    Anyhow, the minimailer is a /bin/mail drop-in substitute and a little
    daemon that manages an outgoing queue. It doesn't resolve MX
    records, and it just knows enough to open an SMTP connection to
    a machine that's running a real MTA that can route mail intelligently.
    It's a good thing to have in a musical instrument that needs to send
    mail, or a web-cam, or something really simple. <shrug>  I'm not
    saying it's a panacea or anything remotely like that! :) Nor am I
    going to force anyone to run/use it.
    
    mjr.
    
    
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