Possible explanation for root ownage?

[Sebastian Hagedorn]

Hi,

yesterday all of a sudden one of the BDB log files had root as owner and 
things stopped working. I'm still trying to figure out how it could have 
happened.

Here's a theory: we have an hourly cron job that provisions /etc/sasldb2 
from our separate user database. Until today this cron job ran as user 
root. For the most part it uses saslpasswd2 and Cyrus::IMAP::Admin to do 
its job, but it also calls mbpath.

I've heard it said that it's unsafe to use the Cyrus utilities as root. 
Most of them don't even work when you try to use them with UID 0. But I 
always thought that mbpath should be safe, because it's read-only. Now I 
wonder.

Is it conceivable that executing mbpath as root messes up BDB's 
environment? If so, I guess it should also refuse to run as root ...

Anyway, I have now modified the cron job to be executed as cyrus.

Cheers, Sebastian
--
Sebastian Hagedorn M.A. - RZKR-R1 (Gebäude 52), Zimmer 18
Zentrum für angewandte Informatik - Universitätsweiter Service RRZK
Universität zu Köln / Cologne University - Tel. +49-221-478-5587
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