on Sun, Feb 03, 2002 at 03:35:59PM +0100, Wojciech Bojdol wrote:
> Making system more secure is just about hour of work.
> I think that only some things like default umask should change.
> By default /root is readable by any user.
> Also users could check what their friends did (just by looking in their
> .bash_history or other files). It's not good for most systems.

.{*sh_,}history files are in all cases, afaik, mode 600.
Under many operating systems /root and /home/$user are world readable
and searchable. It's more open and "friendly". Important files
should have the correct permissions regardless of their parent
directory's permissions.

> How much will cost you space of your wtmp files ? :)
> The best thing to do for you would be support for pipe in last.

It depends on the medium I store them on. How much does it cost to type
gzip -d wtmp.xx.gz; last -f wtmp.xx ? :)

> If httpd is running crontab it could change only his own set of jobs.
> What jobs have got your http user ? :)

None.

> If you want to give users right to change their crontabs via www
> you have to do some script suid root.

Not really, put the output from crontab -l into a textarea, and then when
the user clicks "save" pipe the current contents of that textarea into
crontab -. Assuming whatever user executes the (nonsuid) script has
rights to run crontab, which it would if you used a system like apache's
suEXEC.

> > This is a very site specific setting. Eg: it breaks on a system
> > where passwd is used via a web interface or where pppd runs at.
> 
> Who runs pppd ?
> If it's used to dial-in pppd is running propably from init.

Or as a users login shell.