[ILUG] mail running programs

[John P. Looney]

 Years ago, when sendmail was new, and people didn't go around cracking
into systems, because most of the time, they'd give you a shell account if
you asked, sendmail was able to run programs on the target machine.

 I was wondering - if it could be done securely, would it be something
that would be useful these days ?

 For example;

    Send a mail to a "cron" user, asking it to setup a cron job for such a
        user - like start downloading RedHat 8.0 ISOs which were released
        when you were at home
    Send a mail to "services" asking it start up sshd, so you could SSH in
        from home.
    Send a mail in to exec a program of your choice, and mail you back the
        output. Hey, you could write a shell around this...
    Send a mail asking for a "status" (uptime, load, number of users).
    Send a mail asking for a file - so the file agent would send you a
        reply, with the file attached (memories of "mail FTP"...).

 Dead handy for getting around firewalls etc, or when you are on a machine
that you don't have access to SSH on. However, security would be a
problem. Would it be sufficent to have an /etc/mail_proxy_users,
containing the GPG public keys of those allowed to run commands (and of
course, mails would have to be verified first) ?

Kate

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John Looney             Chief Scientist
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