John P. Looney wrote:
> 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 ?
It can be done securely : just use smrsh to set up a local handler for
the tasks, and put in a virtusertable entry pointing to the handler for
the submission address.
I've used it for story submission and a couple of other tasks, linking
back to a database. The security on my system was limited to source address
and plaintext password in the mail, but you could extend that easily enough
to PGP or whatever.
Vin
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