[ILUG] mail running programs

[Vincent Cunniffe]

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