Subject: Re: Permissions

From: John Goerzen <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2026 11:48:29 -0500

On Wed, Mar 11 2026, Hadmut Danisch wrote:

> What about writing nncp so that it deals properly with the task and has none of
> the drawbacks?

I'm not the author of nncp, but from my perspective it already pretty
much is, modulo a couple of minor tweaks you pointed out.

I mean, what do you propose?

setuid/setgid brings along a whole host of problems.  Now any user on
the system can invoke the tool.  There are very few setuid/setgid
programs anymore on a modern system, and for good reason.  On my system,
which has a fair amount of software installed, the setuid ones all seem
to have system functions (passwd, mount, etc).  The only other one is
procmail, and that has to do with writing into user directories from
MTAs that aren't capable of running it as the user, I suppose.

I think it's a good thing that we have more modern design patterns now.

You can already set it up as a central daemon on the system where
individual users connect to if you want, and I've documented how to do
that also.  There's nothing stopping you from running a separate nncp
for email, another for backups, etc. and they all just transfer files to
the central daemon running as nncp.

- John